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You’ll have to point me to the comments calling for banning of all guns, because I haven’t seen any. Please note: Gun control =/= banning of all guns.

The way you portray things, you’d think accidental shootings happen every day in every city in America and that anyone who legally owns a gun is a mentally unhinged maniac who is either an accident or a mass-murderer waiting to happen.

I argued with Eris, I’m not going to go over the same damn things with you. If someone else wants to, kudos to them. Honestly, you’re not worth the effort. She was disgusting, but at least able to show some level of coherency (at least before she admitted she wants to be able to defend herself when US army comes a-knocking.).

I see a lot of comments from people on your side saying things like “If only the children had been armed.” Comment #4 about babies is particularly amusing. I guess hyperbole is okay when YOUR side and ONLY your side uses it. Hypocrites.

There are over 30,000 gun deaths per year in the USA. That’s getting on for 100 a day. You can compare the rate per 100,000 population of the USA with other countries here. Among rich countries, the USA comes top, by a considerable margin. I bet you’re proud. (It’s worth noting that the second place among rich countries is held by Switzerland, often cited by gun-nuts as refuting the connection between high gun ownership and gun deaths.)

Oh joy! We have a Fox Parrot by the name of jinxmchue here. Do you also want to pull out the Huckabee argument?

I don’t watch or even have Fox News (or anything else on the “vast wasteland” — I prefer to read) and don’t care for Huckabee, but thanks for assuming again, though. You people seem to love to do that. I guess when you have no actual legitimate arguments to make, you go with what you’re best at.

You raise an interesting point. If even the stringent controls placed on firearm ownership in the UK are unable to completely prevent massacres involving legally held firearms, then surely the only way to COMPLETELY prevent such massacres is to completely ban all civilian ownership of firearms!

Sounds good to me.

Derrick Bird’s rampage was the first mass shooting in the UK involving legally-held firearms since the Dunblane massacre. It took Bird a total of two hours to kill 12 members of the public whilst he was driving at random through villages in a sleepy, rural county in northern England. Had his rampage taken place in one of the big cities further south or west, like Newcastle, Manchester or Liverpool – places where violence involving illegal firearms is commonplace and thus the resources to tackle such crimes are readily available – it would’ve been over much more quickly and with far less loss of life. Not to mention the failure in licensing enforcement that came out in the aftermath of Bird’s shooting spree – turns out Bird had been seeking treatment for various mental health issues, and either nobody had bothered to tell the authorities, or the authorities hadn’t bothered to act on the information.

This is all very different to the situation in Newtown, and I don’t doubt that as more details emerge from the police investigation the differences will only become more apparent to anyone willing to see them.

It’s a pity your argument is so full of holes, because I would quite like to have used it to advocate a complete ban on firearms.

Chigau, thanks for the link at 508. This is what it says about the US:

“The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world’s civilian-owned firearms. The homicide rate by firearm is 200 to 800 percent higher in the US than in other advanced countries such as England, France, Australia, and Japan where firearms are more tightly controlled by law.”

There you have it – the statistics prove beyond doubt that gun control is effective at reducing gun related violence in the long term. I also wonder if, tragically, the mother who was murdered kept guns in the house to protect herself. The article goes on to say that studies of domestic violence have shown that gun ownership increases the risk of crimes of passion and other domestic disputes ending in a fatal injury, so the personal safety/ self-defense argument from the gun lobby is also bullshit.

@503:
I haven’t seen the commenter @4 in the past, so I am not sure xe qualifies as ‘you people’ (someone will correct me if I’m wrong). More important, can you not see the inherent sarcasm in hir comment? It’s poking fun at the ridiculous right wing response “oh, there was a tragic shooting? Let’s arm people with guns.” Arming more people with guns to minimize a shooting spree is as nonsensical as giving a baby a gun.
How on Earth did you take that seriously?

jinxmchue, please go away and compare the frequency of firearm massacres in the USA with their frequency in any other country in the world that enjoys a comparable level of political stability and rule of law. Feel free to compare the numbers of multiple killings and the overall level of gun crime as well; feel free to correct for population size.

A situation like this has happened, afaik, once in the UK. Once is too many, obviously, and gun controls were tightened up right afterwards.

On July 27, 2008, a politically motivated fatal shooting took place at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. Motivated by a desire to kill liberals and Democrats, gunman Jim David Adkisson fired a shotgun at members of the congregation during a youth performance of a musical, killing two people and wounding seven others.

uh huh.

It’s hypocritical because neither side knows what would have actually prevented this tragedy.

so… the same exact thing happening in China at nearly the same time, under the same circumstance, the only difference being guy has a knife instead of a gun.

Nick Gotts, yes, you are right. I was thinking of Dunblane as the only time a school has been attacked but it would have been better to stick to the more general point and just compare gun killings overall.

Unfortunately, I can see how this us going to play out. Initially, there will be expressions of horror about the tragedy, paired with statements such as that already made by Obama that ‘now is not the time to discuss gun control’*. If that doesn’t entirely silence discussion, then it will quickly escalate to accusations that gun control advocates are using the deaths in this attack to cynically play polictics.

and then we get jinxmchue @ 482;

Dear armchair “experts,”

Stricter gun laws would not have prevented this tragedy. It is absolutely asinine of you to presume so. It is also hypocritical given your persistent complaints against people who have suggested an armed teacher and/or principal could have stopped this shooting. No one truly knows what could have prevented this. Please stop using this horrific act to advance your personal vendettas against guns, the NRA, Fox News, or what have you. There are families that are devastated beyond what most of us can even imagine. They need to be our focus, not you.

Banning or severely restriting ammunition could be a good way to start controlling guns and gun violence. You can’t do much with an unloaded gun. Also unlike guns which may last for decades if not a century, AFAIK (not 100 % sure), ammunition (especially smokeless powder and primers) will weaken and become unreliable or unusable with time. So the ammo hoarders’ precious cartridges would become a pile of lead and brass smelling like mouse pee and behaving erratically when shot.

Gregory Greenwood, that is not a case of being right. That is a case of seeing this happen after every fucking mass shooting.

I can remember some people were making that argument back in 1999 when <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Nathaniel_SmithBenjamin Smith was on his shooting spree in Illinois and Indiana, that if people were armed, they would be able to fire back. I am sure it goes back even farther but that was the first time it truly struck me as being an asinine argument.

From an article in the NYT about the shooting: “Officials said the killing spree began early on Friday at the house where Mr. Lanza had lived with his mother. There, he shot her in the face, making her his first victim, the authorities said. Then, leaving her dead after taking three guns that apparently belonged to her, he climbed into her car for the short drive to the school.” (Emphasis added.)

It would seem that the tools for casting slugs would fall under the same scrutiny of the ammo itself.

Which wouldn’t be remotely realistic. Molds and casts can be easily carved from a number of materials, etc. A large black market would emerge for both hand-made and commercial ammo, along with the stuff needed to make your own. You can get away with surprisingly little in order to make your own.

While I don’t have any real problem with restricting the amount of ammo one is allowed to horde, I think it’s still closing the gate after the horse is gone.

Michael Moore expressed this sentiment wrt to the overall issue of gun regulation in the US, back in “Bowling for Columbine”, IIRC.

that was quite a while ago.

I often wonder if it is indeed too late now; that too many generations now take gun ownership not as just a right, but more like they seem privileged in every sense of the word; they’ve grown up with the idea that guns in the house are normal and proper, and no branch of government has really given them any cause to ever think differently.

It really will be like trying to reverse Christian religious privilege in the US.

I think we have to think about putting down the horse, instead of trying to get it back in the barn.

I’d imagine ammo failing or going off a few seconds after pulling the trigger would be somewhat less useful.

Caine,

I’m aware that reloading cartridges is done and making (at least black powder) powder is doable but what about primers?

I’m not saying my “cunning plan” is perfect but there would be some effect. The point (which I didn’t state clearly) is that after introduction of severe restrictions on gun ownership or total ban there would be a lot of illegal guns (especially if there is no gun registry), which would be technically usable for decades, however the cartridges have a shorter “shelf life”, so restrictions on them could make guns less useful as instruments of violence.

I’m aware that reloading cartridges is done and making (at least black powder) powder is doable but what about primers?

People make their own ammunition all the time in this country, from the ground up. Do it yourself bullets of all kinds. You might want to read up on it, it’s really not difficult to do. I can tell you it’s a hell of a lot easier making bullets than it is forging a sword.

Oh man now the gun nuts on a rightwing site are saying that cares are more dangerous

Looking at the numbers one would think that Cars would be banned first if it was the prevention of injury that you were after…………
Worse, cars do not just kill- they maim. Many people never get their lives back to normal

“People make their own ammunition all the time in this country, from the ground up.”

I think you’ll find that almost no one does that, if you are talking about pistol, shotgun or rifle cartridges.
It is easy to cast bullets. Making brass cartridge casing, other than by machining them out of solid brass, is virtually impossible for someone without some very large machinery. A few people will modify cases – “necking down” is a moderately common operation. Making primers is vastly beyond the capability of just about everyone. You can buy empty brass, bullets, primers and powder off the shelf. Reloading with those materials certainly is pretty popular.
~~~
“if you grew up with …” (or words to that effect)
I did grow up with guns, lots of guns, in the house. Guns that would NEVER be loaded in the house, under any circumstances. Guns kept put carefully away, out of sight. Guns that were NEVER pointed at a person. After he retired (and I was out on my own) my dad got fairly heavily into collecting certain makes of shotguns. Most of them he never fired, but he enjoyed and was very good at gunsmithing.
A few years ago he and I were driving in Washington or Oregon, and he noticed one of the signs informing what volunteer group was doing cleanup on that section of highway. It was the NRA. I didn’t hear exactly what his comment was, but it was very clearly contemptuous. But we’re Canadian.
Even as the paranoia of dementia set in and dad had delusions of people entering his house to cause mischief, his response was not to keep a loaded gun behind the door, but to decide it was time to get rid of all his guns.

My brother, at one time, owned some handguns. Handgun laws are extremely strict in Canada, and have been for many many decades. Even transporting one in your car requires that you go directly from home to a range. Stop for a coffee and a doughnut and you could find yourself arrested. About the only way you can get a carry permit in Canada is if you are at risk of being eaten on the job. Yet, somehow, my gun nut brother managed to deal perfectly well with those laws, and never once whined about lack of freedom.

Ugh, I’ve just been on the NRA site for the first time, and my god what a bunch of paranoid psychopaths. There are stories celebrating the ‘heroes’ Oliver North and Sarah Palin, how they thwarted treaties that restrict the global arms trade, oh and many charming anecdotes about how people with concealed guns ‘protected’ their families by firing at youths that they felt threatened by. Their youth outreach program also sickens me. Fuck the NRA.

This may not be in the best of taste, but it’s not idiotic &mash; it’s a topical sardonic riff on Diderot’s famous* similar sentiment (“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”).

According to wikipedia, the NRA is often criticised by even more right-leaning gun organizations and libertarians who take a stricter view of the Second Amendment. So yeah, can the libertarians now kindly fuck off out of the atheist movement, you’re embarrasing us all.

Just saw something on Canadian news: the killer’s mother has been described as a “survivalist”. Not sure what, if any, significance there is to that, other than she probably held the “they’re not getting my …, gotta get me some gunz”.
Haven’t we run across something akin to that up-thread somewhere?

evilDoug, I’ve actually met a couple of survivalists IRL, and in both cases I got the strong feeling that they were wishing for that happy day that civilisation would collapse and they would be vindicated and come into their glory.

26 victims at the school, plus mom Nancy Lanza – plus the shooter Adam Lanza – certainly not another victim, but still a body snuffed out by gun violence.

Poor sad families. I was horrified to read the list and hear myself thinking “at least none of them have the same last names, so probably no families have lost two children at once”. Oh if there were any way to make the burden lighter!

evilDoug, I’ve actually met a couple of survivalists IRL, and in both cases I got the strong feeling that they were wishing for that happy day that civilisation would collapse and they would be vindicated and come into their glory.

Survivalists? Every single gun nut forum I’ve ever seen has a hugely popular section devoted to paranoid conspiracy anti-government “Red Dawn” fantasizing about one or another “end of the world as we know it” scenario. And those fantasies are the only way to explain their desire for more and more destructive weapons, higher and higher capacity magazines, and unlimited stockpiles of ammunition.

They can say sporting and hunting and target shooting and self-defense all day and late into the night, but they are fucking lying. What they mean is that they plan on killing a whole lot of people at the very moment that they believe they can get away with it, or when they decide it is necessary, or when they think they don’t have anything left to lose. They all of them WANT to commit violence, on a massive scale. Some of them have a higher trigger threshold than others, but the desire is the same.

Whatever bullshit rationalization they give for why they need more than a basic low-tech weapon with a small amount of ammo and why they oppose reasonable government regulation, the reality is that they are dreaming of mass murder.

Shit. I need to go away from the computer now. I knew it already, and I guess the age shouldn’t matter, but I work in a school with kids just this age, and it does matter to me. Seeing all those sixes and sevens. Of course, the adults, too, but fuck.

Olivia Engel had a part in a nativity play at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church. “She was supposed to be an angel in the play. Now she’s an angel up in heaven,” Monsignor Robert Weiss told a standing-room-only crowd at the church before the play on Saturday.

I’ve written more about this type of (dangerous) false consolation here.

As a US military service member, I hope you can see this, because I’m doing it as hard as I can. *flips joed the bird*

That’s quite a knee-jerk right there. You could have objected in any number of ways, including that other tragedies and atrocities don’t make other tragedies and atrocities any less tragic or atrocious. But you decided to make your objection into an issue of personal offense due to personal identity/affiliation. So, do you actually deny that the U.S. military has caused a large number of civilian casualties, including children, such that your personal offense is due to the misperception that it is false? Or do your loyalties trump such petty concerns as worrying about the “collateral damage” that the United States has caused?

I’m a gun owner. I don’t hunt, but I enjoy recreational shooting. Specifically, shooting coke / beer cans, paper targets, old fence posts, or w/e I can see a bullet hit from w/e distance I’m shooting from. I’m not violent. I don’t want to go shoot anybody. I’m not power tripping. I’m not compensating for my penis size. I don’t think I’m “more manly” b/c I have guns. It’s just fun. Shooting a gun feels the same as shooting a basketball to me. I feel a surge, a rush when I hit the target. I take pride in my ability, or at least smile at the lucky shot and try to do it twice.

When I was 14 we had a foreign exchange student live my family for a year. She was from The Netherlands. I had a paintball gun, and I’ll never forget how she wouldn’t even touch it, much less fire it. This thing hardly looked like a real gun, and only used air power to throw a ball full of non-toxic paint at people. Yet she would have nothing to do with it. That level of fear or repulsion from guns stuck with me and I see a lot of it here. I just don’t get it. I grew up with guns, everybody I know owns them, and yet I don’t feel surrounded by insanity. My roommate has a .44 mag (the “Dirty Harry” gun) and I sleep fine every night.

If, by now, anyone is wondering what the hell my point is, it is I don’t want to lose something I enjoy doing b/c of a small number of nuts. I cock a skeptical eyebrow at all the people who don’t use guns being so quick to give up that right. It’s always easy to get rid of rights (and all the messiness they bring) when one doesn’t exercise them.

I know the US has 11000 gun murders a year. That’s a HUGE number. How many are from rampages with assault rifles, though? 100? Are so many of my fellow liberals willing to take away by force the thousands of assault rifle from thousands of law abiding citizens to save 100 lives? 10,000, sure, but 100? A lot of common good would be done if we did away with the also US-Peculiar 4th amendment. You’ve nothing to hide right?

Most of the murders are from cheap hand guns used in inner city crime. This problem is largely a problem of poor black men in cities who feel they have to join gangs to protect themselves from other gangs, and to be involved in drug traffic b/c that is the only way to make money. I don’t judge them b/c they are largely right. They have been failed and written off as failures by the society around them. Canada, alternatively, does not have a massive underclass of poor people who look different, have a different culture, have a history of abject slavery, and whose very humanity is look upon with indifference by their fellow citizens. Here are the stats: http://projects.wsj.com/murderdata/?mg=inert-wsj#view=all

1/3 of killers are black (with another 1/3 unknown) and approx. half of all murder victims are black. Blacks are approx 1/8th of the total population. If we want to stop gun murders in this country, the best way to do it is to focus on the festering societal problems our (the US) country has.

Sorry if I rambled, these are sort of all my jumbled thoughts on the issue. I look forward to what this community (one I respect deeply) has to say as I continue to read the other posts on this topic across this site.

cotton wrote:Are so many of my fellow liberals willing to take away by force the thousands of assault rifle from thousands of law abiding citizens to save 100 lives? 10,000, sure, but 100?

This reminds me of the argument the mayor of Lake City, FL, made, after local faith-healing deaths. He said, “It may be necessary for some babies to die to maintain our religious freedoms. It may be the price we have to pay; everything has a price.” In the same way, you’re perfectly willing to have hundreds of children die to maintain your freedom to shoot at beer cans with an assault rifle. Children always pay the price to maintain their elders’ precious freedoms.

Besides, why focus only on deaths from mass shootings?
Gun control would also lower the numbers of idiots accidentally shooting themselves or worse – others, kids getting hold of unsecured weapons, assholes shooting their wives or girlfriends in rage, etc.

The FBI collects this data from the states, except for Florida. Florida doesn’t use the FBI’s guidelines when reporting additional information about homicides. The FBI data don’t capture all homicides. The states’ reporting is voluntary, and the country’s thousands of police agencies aren’t consistent in how they report. Some states, including New York, reported no justifiable homicides at all for some years. In recording the circumstances of a murder, the information recorded in the FBI data may capture only the relationship of the killer to one of the victims — but not other victims — in a given situation. Because of the unlimited number of scenarios in which a homicide can occur, the coding used in the FBI database may not explain the full set of circumstances involved.

The data in this interactive is best read as a big-picture summary of the crimes committed nationwide. Not all descriptions may be completely accurate, and further details of specific situations are not available. The information in this database does not reflect convictions for murder or other criminal charges.

cotton: before trusting reported *crime* stats, as opposed to say cause of death stats, consider the established bias in the criminal justice system towards disproportionately investigating and charging blacks with crimes. Plenty of gun deaths aren’t considered or charged as crimes thus don’t show up in crime stats. You even alluded to this:

I know the US has 11000 gun murders a year. That’s a HUGE number.

But not the only number.

There were 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000.[5] The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides,[6] with 17,352 (55.6%) of the total 31,224 firearm-related deaths in 2007 due to suicide, while 12,632 (40.5%) were homicide deaths.[7]

This reminds me of the argument the mayor of Lake City, FL, made, after local faith-healing deaths. He said, “It may be necessary for some babies to die to maintain our religious freedoms. It may be the price we have to pay; everything has a price.”

A Mississippi lawmaker basically said the same thing, about women dying from lack of access to abortion.

“Women may die but eh, we are doing the *moral* thing” he said (and I paraphrase).

One day I was riding around with one of them — we were all just starting to get our driver’s licenses so driving anywhere was fun and cool — when my buddy asked me to open his glove compartment. A dark bundle fell out and I heard a snap, it sounded exactly like a bullwhip cracking. There was a gentle spritz of moisture across my legs and some dark droplets hit the kick panel to my right. I looked down baffled, it took a slow count of ten before it hit me, I had just been shot.

Accidents are common with guns. I don’t know single person who has used a gun to fend off an attack — yes I know it has happened and when you need a gun for that purpose not much else will work. But I’ve known a few people who got hurt or worse accidentally.

Our insistence on being surprised by gun violence, on acting like each mass murderer invented his crime out of thin air, cripples our ability to ask the harder questions about who wants guns, who has them, and who might really turn violent and reach for one.

The NRA’s talking points never seem to address why people want guns. My father wanted guns for pride and power. He would say it was for “self-defense.” But what he calls self-defense, I call living under threat. Because at any moment he might “defend himself” against me. He taught me that guns are no danger in the hands of people who use them responsibly – and he walked that talk by always pointing the gun at the ground while loading or cleaning it, by storing it out of sight and out of reach by pets or children. But the man who taught me those things and practiced those behaviors shouldn’t have owned a gun. Because he hit my mother. If you can’t control your fists, your tongue, or your temper, how can I trust you to control your gun?

Cotton:
Please go unjumble your thoughts and return with a more ethical stance on gun ownership.
Remember these points: you are not part of a well trained militia and your right to FUN is overridden by the right to life.
****
Trying to be calm here but cotton’s load of horseshit pisses me off. How does one develop a moral core that feels it’s more important to retain a trivial ‘right’ than it is to do everything in our power to stop gun violence?

A northern Indiana man who allegedly threatened to “kill as many people as he could” at an elementary school near his home was arrested by officers who later found 47 guns and ammunition hidden throughout his home.

If, by now, anyone is wondering what the hell my point is, it is I don’t want to lose something I enjoy doing b/c of a small number of nuts. I cock a skeptical eyebrow at all the people who don’t use guns being so quick to give up that right. It’s always easy to get rid of rights (and all the messiness they bring) when one doesn’t exercise them.

I know the US has 11000 gun murders a year. That’s a HUGE number. How many are from rampages with assault rifles, though? 100? Are so many of my fellow liberals willing to take away by force the thousands of assault rifle from thousands of law abiding citizens to save 100 lives? 10,000, sure, but 100? A lot of common good would be done if we did away with the also US-Peculiar 4th amendment. You’ve nothing to hide right?

Consider what you are saying here – you are placing your enjoyment of firearm based recreation above the lives of other people. You talk about the deaths of a hundred people a year in rampage shootings as if it is nothing, a minor inconvenience that cannot be allowed to stand in the way of your hobby. And that leaves aside the fact that every victim of gun crime is a victim because of the easy availability of guns in the US – the deaths of every victim in the entire 11000 figure you quoted can be traced back directly to the out of control gun culture in the US.

Can you imagine how this sounds when someone else reads it? It goes beyond being merely selfish into the realms of dehumanising the victims of gun crime, since you seem to consider their lives less important that your entertainment. That is why people are reacting so negatively toward you.

Also;

Most of the murders are from cheap hand guns used in inner city crime. This problem is largely a problem of poor black men in cities who feel they have to join gangs to protect themselves from other gangs, and to be involved in drug traffic b/c that is the only way to make money. I don’t judge them b/c they are largely right. They have been failed and written off as failures by the society around them. Canada, alternatively, does not have a massive underclass of poor people who look different, have a different culture, have a history of abject slavery, and whose very humanity is look upon with indifference by their fellow citizens. Here are the stats: http://projects.wsj.com/murderdata/?mg=inert-wsj#view=all

1/3 of killers are black (with another 1/3 unknown) and approx. half of all murder victims are black. Blacks are approx 1/8th of the total population. If we want to stop gun murders in this country, the best way to do it is to focus on the festering societal problems our (the US) country has.

Before making such blanket statements, you really should stop to consider the epidemic levels of systemic racism within the US justice system that are certainly skewing these statistics.

Fuck I’m crying.
You know, I have those fotos. The pictures of my children, the oldest one being not much younger than those kids, smiling those smiles, thinking those thoughts, being excited about the holidays, and now those kids are gone.
If somebody murdered my kids, I’d probably kill myself because how can you go on after that.

But I’m glad to see that there are more rational people around than me who know that it’s well worth their desire for guns….

Why in fuck’s name would you need an assault rifle to shoot Coke cans?

What I don’t get is why would YOU (generic ‘you’) need YOUR OWN assault rifle to shoot cans. If having it as a hobby is so danged important, have thick-walled gun ranges where you can rent and shoot big-ass guns under expert supervision, like laser tag and paintball and go-kart facilities. (And if that concept seems unpalatable because MY VERY OWN GUN then it’s not the hobby that’s really your issue, is it?)

What I don’t get is why would YOU (generic ‘you’) need YOUR OWN assault rifle to shoot cans. If having it as a hobby is so danged important, have thick-walled gun ranges where you can rent and shoot big-ass guns under expert supervision, like laser tag and paintball and go-kart facilities. (And if that concept seems unpalatable because MY VERY OWN GUN then it’s not the hobby that’s really your issue, is it?)

The way the NRA tells it, such an arrangement would lead instantly to the spontaneous combustion of the Constitution, the fall of democracy in the US*, and the commencement of the invasion of the Lizard People from Alpha Centauri who will seize control of the now defenceless planet** and promtly outlaw guns ownership and all other ‘manly pursuits’, burn all the religious texts, and make heterosexual sex punishable by death***, all while herding humanity into processing camps where we will rendered down into LizardCorp Brand Homo Sapiens ape-burgers, the latest fast food craze to hit the galatic hyperspace ways…

Sadly, the actual NRA position doesn’t make much more sense than the above.

———————————————————————————————————————-

* And thus, naturally, everywhere else in the world, because without Uncle Sam guaranteeing freedom every other nation on the planet will inevitably descend into cannabalistic murder orgies, amiright?

** Because a species technologically capable of interstellar flight naturally has no answer to weapons that throw small pieces of lead at moderate velocities…

*** Because the evil space lizards are bound to be ‘militant homosexuals’, what with being evil and all, and would rather maintain the numbers of their newly aquired bipedal meat herd with unnatural lab based cloning and *gasp* same sex parentage. Because they are evil, and as every good far right wingnut knows science = evil, and same sex parentage makes teh baby jeebus cry.

Kurt Weldon · Top Commenter · Los Angeles, California
I made this point the last time, and the one thing I do know is that I will have cause to make it again: When the Patriot Act was thumbing its nose at the First Amendment, we were told “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” And yet, when the Second Amendment is discussed, the Constitution is very much a suicide pact. The First Amendment is phrased as an absolute. We treat as conditional. The Second is phrased conditionally. We treat it as an absolute.

Pteryxx
Thanks, but not your fault.
I’ve been very glad that I had a very busy weekend so I didn’t get into this too much because damn, that’s close to home (there have been two horrible school shootings in Germany in the last 15 years, so it’s not like it couldn’t happen here*)

dianne
Yes, if one of them survived, probably.
But oh hell, I want to hug, hug, hug them.
And still we’ll part for many years to come and all three of us will enter schools.
You should be safe in schools.

+++

*After the first one they changed gun laws. No more semi-automatics. After the second one they convicted the father of the shooter, too. He hadn’t followed the laws and his weapons and ammunition could be accessed by his son.

Well I don’t actually own an assault rifle, they are a bit out of my price range. Admittedly, though, I would probably enjoy shooting one. Why? For the same reason my buddy Chuck, an amateur racer when he was younger, tends to like Camaros and Mustangs more than SUV’s.

Only one poster addressed the source of the 11,000 gun murders a year in the US and they correctly pointed out that blacks are disproportionately focused on by the police. This is true, but I don’t think that argument, true as it is, is enough to deflect the brunt of my own. If the posters here want to stop gun violence and not just pick on one of their favorite targets (older, white, often southern / rural, gun owning, commonly conservative, men) then the focus should be on inner city gun violence. Why is there so much focus on the cause of 100 deaths (nutjobs in body armor and assault rifles) and not the the other 10,900?

Black and brown children learn very early on that perceptions of race and criminality are intimately connected. In high school when my friends and I found ourselves at the business end of Inglewood PD officers’ rifles because someone in our car “looked” like a burglary suspect, it was a rite of passage initiation. The killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin was a lightening rod because American youth of color saw the failure to bring his killer to justice as symptomatic of the devaluation of their lives. Guilty until proven innocent, youth of color never have the privilege of being universally perceived as the “nice” boy (as Lanza has been described) or girl next door that wouldn’t hurt a fly.

[…]

Nonetheless, mass murder in an urban context is rare and mass shootings in schools of color are virtually unheard of. Homicide is a leading cause of death for young African American men. But contrary to the rap stereotype of Glock-toting men of color, an overwhelming majority of people of color are pro-gun control, while the majority of the white electorate is not. The high school assailants in the Littleton, Colorado, the Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Santee, California shootings were steeped in a NRA besotted gun culture that fetishizes readily available firearms as the ultimate medium for violent white masculinity.

However, these youth were instantly transformed into symbols of troubled, tragically “misunderstood” teens.

If the posters here want to stop gun violence and not just pick on one of their favorite targets (older, white, often southern / rural, gun owning, commonly conservative, men) then the focus should be on inner city gun violence. Why is there so much focus on the cause of 100 deaths (nutjobs in body armor and assault rifles) and not the the other 10,900?

Because the movement to decriminalize drugs is not about lowering incidents of violence.

Jimmy Blue:
More cotton-“black people areresponsible for more gun related deaths so you people should focus on them”. Nothing racist in that line of thinking.
****
Cotton: many of us condemn ALL gun violence. We also do not limit our focus to JUST gun related deaths. Or haven’t you heard of gun related injuries?
I should probably stop holding my breath waiting for you to realize how horrific it is to value owning a gun over human lives.

Another telling thing about cotton– hir first post was a defense of gun ownership in a thread where many people expressed sorrow and grief. Following a tragedy like this, the most important thing to do is defend gun ownership???
How about some damn empathy for the family and friends who lost their loved ones? How can someone care so little for the lives of others?

Alcohol kills people. Driving kills people. Driving will texting kills 600 people. Autoerotic asphyxiation kills 600 every year. Falling out of bed? 450. Vending machines slay 13. Dogs kill 34 every year in the US. Lets ban all of them. I mean, do you think we should allow dogs just b/c we ENJOY them? but people die!!! All so you can cuddle with your pooch!

In a country of 300 million people, and with as many problems as we have, do I think 100 people a year is a highly worrying number? No.

It also isn’t racist to point out where crime is. I’m not blaming black people or saying it is a result of a “violent race.” This country has failed them. My point here is clear. The US built that 12,000 figure from its greed, inhumanity, and indifference that have created an underclass of people who have no reasonable path to a successful life and know it. It is not hard to see how that untenable situation leads to violence.

“People die from other stuff too and every death is absolutely equivalent no matter what the circumstances are. Therefore 100 deaths every year from mass shootings alone is fine with me, as long as I get to shoot coke cans. Why are you people so worried about 100 people dying again?”

cotton: None of those things you just listed are designed to kill. Guns are designed to kill. Regardless of what inanimate targets you personally use them on, guns are designed to kill. Or at least maim.

Cotton,
OK, you like shooting. I get that. Hell, my wife likes shooting. She shoots a .38 black powder muzzle loader. It takes her about 1-2 minutes between shots. She has a blast shooting that thing, and I really don’t worry much that someone will steal it and gun down a kindergarten class.

So, here’s the thing. Yes, folks get killed by drivers who are texting–so they’ve banned texting while driving in most states. Yes, folks are killed by dogs–and now, the morons have banned pitbulls in several municipalities. If you like shooting, maybe it is time to take responsibility and figure out ways where you can still have fun and we don’t have to worry quite as much every time we send our kids off to school.

Maybe we could ban assault-type rifles. Maybe we could ban high capacity clips. Maybe we could have harsher penalties for gun owners who don’t take care of their damned guns (e.g. trigger locks, gun safes…). Because ultimately, I think if you go up against the moms of America, they’re gonna kick your pasty white, redneck ass.

Cotton, I want you to find one instance of a person committing an act of autoerotic asphyxiation that ends up killing twenty children, you know, one where principals and teachers are sacrificing themselves to the man committing autoerotic asphyxiation in order to try to protect children.

Ok, I tried the civility.
COTTON:
You are a fuckwit.
You actually equated deaths caused by vending machines to deaths caused by guns? That’s a level of stupid I’m accustomed to from creobots.
Why the hell are you so dismissive of the lives lost to gun violence? Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, friends, lovers…REAL PEOPLE have lost their lives…their families have lost loved ones…you are a callous, insensitive idiot who cares more about a fucking gun than a human life. It’s like you cannot see past the numbers to the lives that have been snuffed out or devastated by this out of control gun culture.

Janine,
The article is fine, but parts made me laugh (not the funny kind):

…one key public policy question — does gun control save lives? — is almost impossible to answer thanks to a dearth of research on the subject.

While research in US should be done, and I understand the intention of the author, it is not true that the question is (almost) impossible to answer. If only US would realize that there exists all this world outside of US, a large part of which takes gun control seriously, the answers would be quite obvious .

In 1996, after various studies funded by the agency found that guns can be dangerous

[X-posted from the Thunderdome, since this seems like the place where that discussion is going on]

I’m just going to leave this here because I’m incoherent with disgust and rage. A conservative friend of mine on facebook, in a discussion about gun policy, explicitly states that, while uncontrolled gun ownership will lead to both mass murders like the Sandy Hook massacre and the obscene murder and suicide rate in the United States, he values the right to own guns more than the utility of banning or controlling them. He states, correctly, that conservatism and liberalism are inherently at odds because of our respective conflicting values.*

I just can’t believe that anyone would say, out loud, that repeated incidents of dead schoolchildren are an acceptable trade off for the “right” to own machines designed solely for killing people without restriction. And this is not an ignorant yokel, he’s both a life-long urbanite and one of the most rawly intelligent people I’ve ever met.

*This is a paraphrase because the friend who started the discussion by posting the “wait until they’re buried” gambit and asked for people to justify their insensitive discussing gun control cowardly deleted the post after I pointed out that silence is as useful as praying.

Cotton:
You have disturbingly casual disdain towards the 11,000 people who are killed each year in the United States by gun violence, and your ‘argument’ against gun control is either disingenuous or willfully ignorant. 20 children between the ages of 5 and 7 have just been murdered, and all you can fucking talk about is your ‘right’ to own guns.

I grew up with guns, everybody I know owns them, and yet I don’t feel surrounded by insanity. My roommate has a .44 mag (the “Dirty Harry” gun) and I sleep fine every night.

Claims about the safety of owning firearms ought to be resolved by factual evidence, not irrelevant anecdotes. You and your family are more likely to be killed or injured with guns in the house, so you should feel less safe.

I cock a skeptical eyebrow at all the people who don’t use guns being so quick to give up that right. It’s always easy to get rid of rights (and all the messiness they bring) when one doesn’t exercise them

Again, why the fuck do you think you have a right to own guns without a system that diligently controls their use and availability? Please explain why your negative liberty to be free from gub’mint control is more important than other people’s right not to live in a society that is scarred by out of control gun violence.

I know the US has 11000 gun murders a year. That’s a HUGE number. How many are from rampages with assault rifles, though? 100? Are so many of my fellow liberals willing to take away by force the thousands of assault rifle from thousands of law abiding citizens to save 100 lives? 10,000, sure, but 100?

Only 100 people are killed by assault rifles each year? Good grief. So unless 10,000 people are killed by assault rifles then we have no reason for wanting them banned. You’re one sick fuck.

Most of the murders are from cheap hand guns used in inner city crime. This problem is largely a problem of poor black men in cities who feel they have to join gangs to protect themselves from other gangs, and to be involved in drug traffic b/c that is the only way to make money. I don’t judge them b/c they are largely right. They have been failed and written off as failures by the society around them. Canada, alternatively, does not have a massive underclass of poor people who look different, have a different culture, have a history of abject slavery, and whose very humanity is look upon with indifference by their fellow citizens…
1/3 of killers are black (with another 1/3 unknown) and approx. half of all murder victims are black. Blacks are approx 1/8th of the total population. If we want to stop gun murders in this country, the best way to do it is to focus on the festering societal problems our (the US) country has.

Gun violence disproportionately affects poor black and minority communities. What’s your point? All this demonstrates is that we should control handguns as well as a matter of urgency, it does not give you carte blanche to own any kind of lethal weapons that you want to get your hand on.

Beatrice, the article is specifically about how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was defunded from studying gun violence.

And this would be funny if it were not so deadly but the NRA and the rest of the right wingers in the US actively ignore the rest of the world, about how lack of access to weapons leads to a reduction of fire arms death.

While this is a minor point, we had one gun nut make the argument that a person murdered over twenty in a school in China with a knife when in truth, they were injured. This is typical.

If the posters here want to stop gun violence and not just pick on one of their favorite targets (older, white, often southern / rural, gun owning, commonly conservative, men)[*] then the focus should be on inner city gun violenceone of my favorite targets: black and brown people.

I’m just going to let that sink in, because my head is still hurting from the idea that having fun shooting beer cans is worth dead people.

*Citation needed.

Why is there so much focus on the cause of 100 deaths (nutjobs in body armor and assault rifles) and not the the other 10,900?

Yes, why don’t we take away all of the guns? Finally, you have an idea a decent, sensible person would have!

Wait, no, you mean cracking down black and brown people**, not guns. Fuck, you’re still a clueless shithead.

**Simply saying “society has failed them” does not suggest you want anything other than to make them the problem and make things even worse for them.

He values “freedom”, which means essentially no government and unbridled capitalism. I value human beings and reducing suffering. And this leads us to logic to our opinions “Dead children okay because freedom” and “Dead children not okay because suffering bad”

There are standards, controls, and regulations pertaining to the construction of beds and bed components.

Vending machines slay 13.

There are controls and regulations pertaining to the construction of vending machines, and the manner in which they must be installed and operated, to prevent things like tipping over and injuring and killing people.

Dogs kill 34 every year in the US.

Dogs are controlled and regulated.

Thank you, Cotton, for demonstrated unequivocably, through analogy, that gun control and regulation is a GOOD IDEA.

Thank you very much.

(And if reasonable controls and regulations could reduce gun violence deaths from 10 000 to 500? I would take that.)

And what the fuck is wrong with allowing single-shot guns only and confining them to secure, licensed gun-clubs anyway? You can refine your exquisite target-shooting skills all you want (I’ve done this a lot, and loved it) and you can shoot all the targets and tin cans you want – just don’t wander around the streets with automatics and semi-automatics in your car or about your person.

I honestly can’t believe people would put not just their fun but a mere detail of their fun ahead of people’s lives. If you want to shoot, do it in a bloody gun club where someone with proper safety training is there to make sure idiots don’t fuck around with tools designed specifically to kill.

You’ve made that accusation twice Icthyic. It shows you don’t really know what you’re talking about. Pointing out failings of the US society towards our fellow black citizens is not, I assure you, a key concern of most Romney demographics.

Your earlier post that said you “don’t much care for them” shows that you share one of those Romney demographic traits I can’t stand: The desire to subjugate and defeat your political opponents. They must not only lose, they must be crushed. I admit I had my schadenfreude (Nov 6th was circled on my calendar at work as “Obama reelection day” and Nov 7th as “Gloat day”, as my fellow coworkers here in rural Mississippi tended to lean politically from me quite far). Having said that, I got it out of my system in about two weeks.

Some others said my comparisons were silly. Cars are necessary but guns are not. How are pets necessary? How is alcohol? Ask some of the victims of spouse / child abuse whose parents always reeked if they think the fun of alcohol has no darker side. Why don’t we ban cars that go over 80 mph? What POSSIBLE purpose do they have except reckless fun?

Fun can sometimes be reckless. Sports from high school up to the Olympics cannot be justified outside of fun. Neither can bungee jumping or parachute diving. Theme parks with their high flying rides kill a few every year and they have NO purpose but fun. How about Big Macs and fries? Is there any justification for that many calories (over 1k w/o drink) intended for one meal and one person? Of course not.

There has to be a balance. Am I willing to have a state that forcibly strips law abiding gun owners who have never done anything wrong of their property, much of which is cherished and handed down through generations, in order to save 100 people a year? No.

I want gun murders in the US to be far lower. For this to happen, this country must focus on why such a large portion of a minority feels that violence is inescapable in their communities. This isn’t as fun or easy as saying “let’s show those old white Romney voting men who runs this country!!!” This is the harder choice. It is where most of those 12,000 (up from 11,000 as research tells me) murders are. I am not selfish, or uncaring, or indifferent for saying lets focus our efforts on gun murders where 99% (11,900/12000) of those murders are.

I can’t help but believe that those who want to focus on the 0.8% of US gun murders have a self serving agenda of crushing a common political opponent instead of genuinely improving the situation.

Am I willing to have a state that forcibly strips law abiding gun owners who have never done anything wrong of their property, much of which is cherished and handed down through generations, in order to save 100 people a year? No.

Fine. Let’s control ammunition instead, then. It can be sold and used only at shooting ranges for certain types of guns. For the limited number of types of guns approved for hunting, they can be sold in limited amounts with hunting licenses, the remainder turned back in for a partial refund after hunting season, and anyone caught with their own ammo (bought or homemade) outside of those restrictions gets, oh, a 10k or so fine. That way you can keep all the guns you want.

Seen on twitter: We can carry concealed handguns, but not openly carry axes. Why?

“I’m not the problem, you guys are, because everything I point out is exactly like the gun violence and gun control issues you’ve been talking about. How can you not see the similarities between owning a poodle and owning an AK-47? It’s just 100 deaths, what’s the problem?”

Hunting rifles should really have three shots, minimum two, before one has to reload, in order to limit the suffering of a wounded animal (deer can move surprisingly fast with, for example, a broken leg). Plus, it’s probably safer to be able to take one’s prey within range of one’s stand than to have to wander after it for a couple of miles and be in range of other hunters. But I agree with the sentiment.

Do you literally vomit when you spew this shit, or do you manage to hold your lunch in somehow?

There has to be a balance.

Like having reasonable regulations and bans on guns?

Am I willing to have a state that forcibly strips law abiding gun owners who have never done anything wrong of their property, much of which is cherished and handed down through generations, in order to save 100 people a year? No.

What does “law-abiding” have to do with it? Is there never a first time someone commits a crime, or is it exactly the fucking opposite because there’s always a first time?

Why is your “property” worth 100 people a year? And who says it’s only 100 people a year anyway?

I want gun murders in the US to be far lower.

You just said you don’t give a fuck, because you like “reckless fun” and ramble your way through tons of fucking absurd analogies.

I am not selfish, or uncaring, or indifferent for saying lets focus our efforts on gun murders where 99% (11,900/12000) of those murders are.

How about where 100% of gun murders are? Do you know where that is? Places with guns. That’s where gun murders happen.

I can’t help but believe that those who want to focus on the 0.8% of US gun murders

Amphiox: You have me dead to rights till the end: If gun control could get the problem from 10000 to 500, then its a success. But assault rifles are not 9500. They are less than 100.

I’m all for regulations. I have zero issue with making gun ownership a bit more arduous. It should be illegal to leave guns and ammo in the open and easy to access. Owners should be responsible for what their guns do, with very few and clear exceptions. If someone who is not licensed to own a gun has access to one, their actions should fall upon the one with access who was negligent. Also, anyone who wants to own a gun should have to go through some basic checks. Do they have a criminal record? A history of violence / anger issues? Those are some basics but as a gun owner I wouldn’t mind jumping through some hoops and losing a day or two if it would save lives.

The fact is there are a LOT of people who enjoy assault rifles and the overwhelming majority never do anything to anyone. They don’t understand why they are viewed with such scorn. They aren’t hurting anybody. According to the NRA 2.5 million AR pattern rifles have been sold in the US since 1986. How many have been used to murder? Vanishingly few.

Why is there no outcry here when another black man is gunned down in New Orleans, St. Louis, or Baltimore (1,2, and 3 on the murder / non-negligent manslaughter rankings respectively)? Take Sandy Hook and multiply by over 100. This is where the murders are! . When that young man grabs an automatic pistol, this is not the beginning of a problem. The problem began LONG before he grabbed a gun and shoots someone or gets shot himself. This is the tragic end of the failure in our society to care about all the people who make it up.

Again, I think many of you just don’t like gun owners. They are everything many of ya’ll are not and don’t like. They tend to be more racist, homophobic, anti-women, and they vote red. They are often the loudest and vitriolic in their disagreements with many liberals (a group I consider myself in, if ya’ll don’t rescind my card). Many of ya’ll don’t like them, and while I don’t doubt the care and concern shown for other human beings (my rough definition of a liberal) I think many of you are too quick to lay the blame at the feet of people ya’ll just can’t stand.

I can’t help but believe that those who want to focus on the 0.8% of US gun murders have a self serving agenda of crushing a common political opponent instead of genuinely improving the situation.

People want to focus on this because it just happened. And people want to focus on it because 28 people were killed by guns.
28.
People.
Died.

There are often other threads about other gun killings here. You imply that no one disagreeing with you cares about this. You are wrong. You are using other situations to minimise what actually happened.

Why is there so much focus on the cause of 100 deaths (nutjobs in body armor and assault rifles) and not the the other 10,900?

Why focus on the 11,000 homicides and not the 18,000 or so suicides (plus a few hundred deaths from firearm accidents)? Oh right, because homicides are *crimes* and *crimes* can be blamed on that black minority and their culture. Well, one-third of the crimes anyway. Even by the WSJ stats you cited they’re not “most of”, liar. Here’s what you said at #593:

1/3 of killers are black (with another 1/3 unknown) and approx. half of all murder victims are black.

Speaking of those 18,000:

“The risk of firearm death in very rural counties is the same as the risk for big cities,” notes the FICAP report. “Rural areas have higher risks for firearm suicide and unintentional injury, while the risks for firearm homicide and assault are greater in urban areas.”

And while you’re pontificating about how “this country” has to focus on those people’s communities, recall that I cited Sikivu above (bolds mine):

Homicide is a leading cause of death for young African American men. But contrary to the rap stereotype of Glock-toting men of color, an overwhelming majority of people of color are pro-gun control, while the majority of the white electorate is not.

Fancy that. Those brown people, who also are part of this country, care more about changing their culture than you do.

cotton’s actual quote from #655:

I want gun murders in the US to be far lower. For this to happen, this country must focus on why such a large portion of a minority feels that violence is inescapable in their communities. This isn’t as fun or easy as saying “let’s show those old white Romney voting men who runs this country!!!” This is the harder choice. It is where most of those 12,000 (up from 11,000 as research tells me) murders are. I am not selfish, or uncaring, or indifferent for saying lets focus our efforts on gun murders where 99% (11,900/12000) of those murders are.

Sorry, misreadthe quoted material in #668. funny how gun nuts claim they are for more regulations, like you can’t buy a gun unless you behave with proper range safety controls at all times…OOPS, that’s correct, concealed carry is their RIGHT….So they can carry weapons with ammo in it in public, against all safety protocols…

If someone who is not licensed to own a gun has access to one, their actions should fall upon the one with access who was negligent.

This is of no fucking importance to the parents of dead children.
Their children are dead. Dead is forever. They do not get to see them grow up. They will live the rest of their lives as parents who children died. Every birthday, every christmas they will wonder what could have been. They will not “get over” this, and your casual reference to people being negligent over their murders is fucking insulting.

Icythic: Yes we have speed limits. We also have laws against shooting people. The entire point of control point is that those laws are not enough, we need to ban the guns before they are used to break said law. So…why not ban cars that go over 80 mph? You need a new argument.

Am I crushed yet? No, but not for want of trying.

Do any die from basketball? No, not w/o an underlying condition. Football though…lot of concussions I’m hearing about. We should probably ban it.

Lastly, I’ve never said nor implied that black people in this country have just given up. They haven’t. Many of them realize that the best way to make money given their situation is to sell drugs (a dangerous and violent industry). The fact that this is true is our failing as a country. I don’t blame them anymore than I blame poor women who resort to prostitution. They are all choosing the best of the shitty options they have.

Pterryx: I admit, I care more about homicide than suicide. Again, a young person putting their hands on a gun and pointing at their own head is the end of a problem, not the beginning. I also would be in favor of gun control keeping guns far away from young people who are prone to emotional swings. I don’t agree with guns just being “loose”. My dad did, and I played with guns as a kid. I’m lucky as hell I didn’t blow my head off or the heads of my friends. Lastly, the gun control many proposed here (lever / bolt guns, low capacity mags, etc etc) would do no good b/c at point blank range, even the most “nerfed” gun is still just as lethal.

Chigau: Well assault rifles are really just rifles with accessories. Take a hunting rifle, add a bigger magazine and a pistol grip (faster target acquisition) and you have an assault rifle. They fire the same bullets.

Tony: If it matters, I teared up reading the story as the news broke. I have a great deal of empathy, and I’m very sorry it happened. It pains me greatly as I process the unthinkably tragic effects of that day. However, as the owner of this blog said, saying that “now is not the time to talk about it” is bullshit. Well, OK lets talk about it.

I don’t give a fuck. Every fucking gun in the fucking country, no matter which fucking person owns it, should be regulated much more heavily. Some kinds of guns should be banned outright. That would be a start.

To Caerie: That isn’t what I meant. I do not think that a problem was tidily wrapped up after your father (I presume) killed himself. It was the tragic finale of his problems, problems that had clearly been mounting long before that day. It was also the beginning of other problems, including the effects on those close to him. Your father should have had access to help, maybe even someone to bring it to him. I’m sorry he didn’t. Also, as a decent person, I wouldn’t go seeking those whose lives have been marked by gun violence to argue with. I don’t argue my pro-drugs / alcohol stance around those who have had their own lives marked by drug abuse for the same reason. I might be wrong, I might be right, but I would definitely be an asshole. The internet makes that exercise more difficult, and I’m sorry for any pain my words have caused you.

I’ve tried to approach this the “right way” but limited that to trying not to be a smart ass. I really hope I didn’t write something flippant or uncaring that mocks the pain you’ve encountered.

I really like how you’re wielding the menace of scary Black and Hispanic men with as a political talking point, as if Black and Hispanic communities were monolithic masses of human garbage just waiting for you to come in and save them from themselves, conveniently allowing you to ignore the myriad “accidental shootings” and murders committed by White people.

a young person putting their hands on a gun and pointing at their own head is the end of a problem, not the beginning.

Wife and I feel much safer without a gun in the house. Always have.

If we had had a handgun, or any firearm, in the house when I decided to end my life about fifteen years ago, I’d be dead. Luckily, I got my stomach pumped and spent two weeks in a hospital. And survived. And have learned to live.

So, am I a problem that would have been over? Or am I alive because Wife and I do not want a gun in the house?

Again, a young person putting their hands on a gun and pointing at their own head is the end of a problem, not the beginning.

And once they’re dead, no more problem? Gah… Leaving aside what a horribly callous and shit thing you just said *cough* more of those troubled young people stay alive when guns aren’t around. Basically, guns contribute roughly as much to the suicide rate as *actually being suicidal* does.

Ecologic studies that compare states with high gun ownership levels to those with low gun ownership levels find that in the U.S., where there are more guns, there are more suicides. The higher suicide rates result from higher firearm suicides; the non-firearm suicide rate is about equal across states.

I’ll make this as simple as I can. A disproportionate number of black people commit a large number of gun murders. This is as much an opinion as 2+2=4. Yes, it is very commonly used by racists to argue that black people are just violent by nature. While this is a VERY bad conclusion, it does not erase the need for an explanation that is NOT really really bad. I think its is something along the lines of: Being poor in the US sucks. Being black in the US sucks. Being poor and black in the US really sucks. What is yours? Whatever it is, solve that and you solve a LOT of gun murders.

In regards to cars: We have laws that say people cannot speed. Yet they do, and they die and kill others. A lot. Every day. We have laws that say people cannot shoot others. Yet they do, every day. If your argument is that we should ban guns b/c the laws are not helping, you have to also ban fast cars for the same reason or at least justify why not. Otherwise your argument has a hole.

Instead of talking about the true center of my argument, that assault rifles kill VERY few people, there seems to be a lot of effort to stick “racist” or “callous” to me. That would have the unintended (I’m sure) consequence of making my opinions easy to dismiss or even have banned. I must be a villainous evil cretin. It is simply impossible to NOT be and simply disagree on gun control.

Brass tacks, 12000 people are killed by guns every year. Approx 1% are rampage shootings. Half of those involve assault rifles. Tell me, why the focus on assault weapons? You would have to show that non-rampage shootings have a lot of assault rifles involved. I don’t think they do. Do you have evidence otherwise?

If it matters, I teared up reading the story as the news broke. I have a great deal of empathy, and I’m very sorry it happened. It pains me greatly as I process the unthinkably tragic effects of that day.

I’m sure the parents staring at wrapped Christmas presents they’ll never be able to give their children now are greatly comforted by hearing of your tears.

Again, a young person putting their hands on a gun and pointing at their own head is the end of a problem, not the beginning.

I will grant you a little more charity in interpretation and assume that what you meant was that a young person using a gun is the culmination of a lifetime of bad things happening to them, not that you meant the problem is over once they commit suicide. And yes, from that vantage point we have to do more to help people through their lifetimes, which is what a lot of us are talking about in other ways on other threads. But it ALSO helps to eliminate the proximal issue, which is access to easy ways to express anger violently against self and others.

For the last time: we are concerned with firearms period. Gun (more accurately ‘firearm’) violence across the country. It is rampant. In the inner city. In the suburbs. Black. White. Hispanic. Gun violence affects all races. You keep trying to twist the conversation in your preferred direction.
Would I be happy with a ban on all guns (for civilians)? Yes.
Realistically, I will have to settle for stricter gun laws.
FFS it is easier to get a gun in some areas of the US than it is for a woman to get an abortion!!

Are assault rifles hunting rifles? Are they made for target shooting? Or are assault rifles designed to kill people? What do you suppose the ‘assault’ means in the term assault rifle if not to be used in a military assault to kill, or otherwise remove from the field, other human beings.

I’ll make this as simple as I can. A disproportionate number of black people commit a large number of gun murders.

Complete fucking dishonesty.

This is concealing the point that most gun murders are not committed by black people. Meanwhile, most murders are committed with guns. So when you have a problem with murder, especially those which involve guns and not especially those which involve black people, then DO NOT FUCKING TREAT BLACK PEOPLE AS IF THEY WERE THE PROBLEM.

Tony, that’s a bit fair. A lot of people focus on assault weapons, so I did too. You don’t and so I can see the apparent dodge.

If there were no guns (or super low numbers) then yah, that would put a big dent in gun murders. But how do you do actually implement that? Civil liberties take a hit. If you say it is worth it, at least you are willing to bite the bullet (so to speak) and I can’t even accuse you of being inconsistent, much less wrong. A lot of people enjoy owning guns, it is a way of life for them, and they were handed down through generations, but that’s just too damn bad. Ok.

BTW, would you also be in favor of a national public register of all who had AIDS? With forced testing every few years for all citizens? In the time it takes to put on a condom a quick click on an app and you could see if your potential partner had AIDS and when they were last tested. There would be a HUGE increase in the number of people that knew their HIV status, and we would save lives as well as a lot of money on AIDS treatment. Helluva bullet to bite though.

I do not consider owning a gun to be a fundamental right of all humans. It is not essential. Food. Water. Shelter. Those are essential. The costs of gun ownership FAR exceeds any pleasure they grant people. Yes, I believe with the situation as it is in this country, I have no problem making them illegal. If things were different…if people didn’t commit suicide with guns…if homicides weren’t so frequent…if tragedies like 18 dead children and 9 adults didn’t occur, then sure let every person who wants a gun be able to have one. But gun possession is a luxury that is killing people.

Cotton:
There is a huge difference between violating personal autonomy by forcing people to register their status and eliminating a non essential luxury.
That comment was the last straw. I have nothing left to say to you. I am disgusted that you would make such a comparison.

A lot of people enjoy owning guns, it is a way of life for them, and they were handed down through generations, but that’s just too damn bad. Ok.

Obviously you’re ignoring my suggestion about ammunition control. Ok.

BTW, would you also be in favor of a national public register of all who had AIDS? With forced testing every few years for all citizens?

You know what there is a national register for? People who use schedule IV controlled substances. Because that shit is heavily regulated. Why? Because those chemicals are so dangerous to people who use them. Do you favor eliminating all laws and regulations for everything that can cause damage to people? If not, why do you personally draw the line at guns?

BTW, would you also be in favor of a national public register of all who had AIDS? With forced testing every few years for all citizens? In the time it takes to put on a condom a quick click on an app and you could see if your potential partner had AIDS and when they were last tested. There would be a HUGE increase in the number of people that knew their HIV status, and we would save lives as well as a lot of money on AIDS treatment. Helluva bullet to bite though.

chigau – I can’t tell yet if that was malice or just abject stupidity. A few more comments ought to clear it up. So, cotton, let’s play a quick game of “one of these things is not like the others”. Do you have any comprehension as to why the analogies you’re using are inappropriate?

The people who have been telling me to fuck off for the last few hours have suddenly have fainted. This precludes them from presenting a consistent view on saving human lives vs. the rights of citizens and where they “draw the line”. Damn.

Well, to Carlie: What specifically do you have in mind? The devil is in the details.

Also I do NOT think there should be a registry for users of Schedule IV drugs. The drug war is one of the worst examples of government legislation ever. I do think the government should offer help to those who are trapped in drug abuse while leaving alone those that use it w/o suffering addiction. The specifics of that assistance should be planned with compassion as the guiding principle, not disgust.

Well, in the meantime, why don’t we put some real control on all the guns flowing through these underserved communities and at least make sure that fewer people die in gun violence while we address the bigger problems in the system? Maybe make it so that there aren’t so many suicides and accidental gun deaths and domestic shootings as well? (note how I haven’t even mentioned spree shootings outside these parentheses) Oh right, because then you wouldn’t be able to empty a cartridge into a Coke can.

Let’s control ammunition instead, then. It can be sold and used only at shooting ranges for certain types of guns. For the limited number of types of guns approved for hunting, they can be sold in limited amounts with hunting licenses, the remainder turned back in for a partial refund after hunting season, and anyone caught with their own ammo (bought or homemade) outside of those restrictions gets, oh, a 10k or so fine. That way you can keep all the guns you want.

I don’t blame any of those groups for anything. I pointed out that they are in terrible positions, relative to the mainstream. Maybe I’m wrong, though. Please, in all seriousness, tell me what the explanation is? Maybe you don’t know and you think I don’t either, fair enough.

I live in the south and I see every day the effects of indifference (the son of outright racism) in the populace around me. Whites send their children to the private schools, that way they don’t have to care about the failing public ones. Whites flee from the inner cities so they don’t have to care about those that can’t afford to flee with them. Whites go to churches that are full of other white people so they don’t have to feel uncomfortable at how their problems are petty when seen in relief compared the problems of their fellow black citizens. They don’t make black friends and they tell their children to avoid befriending them lest they be forced to socialize or be ostracized by white society. I didn’t read about this, it is how I was raised in rural Mississippi and the world I grew up in. I think, to sum up, this has REALLY bad effects on people. It corrodes the souls of whites, and it impoverishes blacks. One leads to callous indifference, the other a trapped life.

I’ve been trying to undo that legacy in my own heart since I became an older teenager and first saw beyond the bubble that I grew up in. I have worked and continue to work on this. The same is true for homophobia and women. I thought, to put it charitably, less than progressive for many years of my life. Fixing these things is difficult and dealing with regrets is hard. If you were raised more progressively, I hope you appreciate it. It has been as painful as it was necessary for my development as a human being and I take accusations of victim-blaming and hatred very seriously.

I wrote this a bit more emotionally than everything else, sorry if it rambles / doesn’t read easy.

The people who have been telling me to fuck off for the last few hours have suddenly have fainted. This precludes them from presenting a consistent view on saving human lives vs. the rights of citizens and where they “draw the line”. Damn.

Last time I checked, most people don’t go to the AIDS Show™ to buy their AIDS without needing to get a background check, you stupid fucking asshole. You know why? Because you’ve completely lost touch with fucking reality.

chigau: he is an insensitive, unthinking, callous, self absorbed asshole. I don’t think that is quite alert worthy, but I wouldn’t shed a tear if he were kicked out either. Oh and he is dense to think people have no argument when we’ve been arguing that gun ownership never trumps human life. Shoot, I forgot he’s also fuckwitted enough to compare violating personal autonomy (an actual fundamental human right) with taking away his toys (not a fundamental right).

I’ve been trying to undo that legacy in my own heart since I became an older teenager and first saw beyond the bubble that I grew up in. I have worked and continue to work on this. The same is true for homophobia and women. I thought, to put it charitably, less than progressive for many years of my life. Fixing these things is difficult and dealing with regrets is hard. If you were raised more progressively, I hope you appreciate it. It has been as painful as it was necessary for my development as a human being and I take accusations of victim-blaming and hatred very seriously.

You should write an an autobiography.
And maybe someone could make a movie out of it.

Well I do have to go. I’ll come back tomorrow to see if I got banned or if there is anything left to say. I’ll answer Carlie before I do.

There is a LOT of ammo out there right now. Still, I guess it would eventually run out / corrode after 50 years.

You also realize that would financially crush people (like bankrupt them) if they kept a 10 round magazine that they forgot about. They’d have to prove it was an accident, I guess. Still, eventually you’d get your wish. Its VERY restrictive though (the only way to do it successfully) and so my response is the same as the one to Tony. You basically really piss a lot of people off and take away something very important to them for the good of all.

I read cotton’s #726 as sincere.
But that is so far outside my personal experience, I cannot grok it.
I won’t alert at this time (despite that AIDS stupidity).
[I just know I will run afoul of cross-posting and late-refresh]

Let me be very clear: I am more than happy to piss off every single person in this country by telling them no, they can’t have every dangerous toy they want to have, if it would keep one child from having to play dead in a classroom, covered with her classmates’ blood, and then live with that for the rest of her life.

While “my fun is more important than dead children” is indeed disgusting, it’s also not even relevant. Sensible gun control does not actually stop people having “fun with guns”.

Not long ago I went to a local gun range and fired a muzzle loading flintlock, in company with a bunch of re-enactors in hand-made 18th century uniforms. It was fun. I think the other people there from the various gun clubs – safely practicing target shooting, whether in costume or not – were also having fun. Gun control means that guns are registered, and background checks are required, and there are safety regulations, and not every possible type of gun is available to everyone.

Let me be very clear: I am more than happy to piss off every single person in this country by telling them no, they can’t have every dangerous toy they want to have, if it would keep one child from having to play dead in a classroom, covered with her classmates’ blood, and then live with that for the rest of her life.

But you see, it’s like football. That six year old signed up for it at the beginning of the season. She and all the other victims knew they were putting themselves at risk by deciding to be alive in this fucking country with shitheads like cotton. Yet they take that risk, because it’s “fun.”

Somehow in that moment, by God’s grace, [she] was able to act as she was already deceased.”

“The mom told me, and I thought this was very insightful, that she was suffering from what she felt was survivor’s guilt because so many of her friends no longer have their children but she has hers,” the pastor said.

The Daily Mail said the girl was the first student to run out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School following the mass shooting, which left 20 children and 6 adults dead.

Pastor Solomon went on to say on ABC News: “What did she see in there?”

“Well, she saw someone who she felt was angry and somebody who see felt was mad.

“How at 6 1/2 years old can you be that smart, that brave? I think it’s impossible outside of divine intervention. She has wisdom beyond her years.”

You also realize that would financially crush people (like bankrupt them) if they kept a 10 round magazine that they forgot about. They’d have to prove it was an accident, I guess.

First off, anyone who has ammo lying around they don’t know about isn’t responsible enough to have guns in the first place.

Second, there’s no way we’d ever have enough law enforcement to make it a primary offense with house by house searches, nor would that be very effective – what it would do is remove the majority of ammunition from circulation, and would help create a cultural shift whereby people stockpiling guns and ammo and shooting it off in the woods for fun are thought of as dangerous lawbreaking assholes rather than thinking of them as Patrick Swayze in Red Dawn.

So why didn’t it occur to me that my father’s guns could protect me from my father? After all, the NRA propaganda that saturated my youth said that handguns were equalizing forces in society. It didn’t matter if you were a tiny, skinny person or even a child – if you had a gun, you could defend yourself.

I don’t think that’s true anymore.

When someone initiates violence, you usually don’t get to prepare. Especially not the kinds of violence I would have faced as a young woman.

[…]

The other most common types of violence I could expect to face as a young woman are intimate partner violence and date rape. Guns wouldn’t really protect me in either of those cases. In the case of intimate partner violence, the same disadvantages apply as they did with my father: if I had a gun on me, my partner would know about it and be able to use it against me. Guns are quick weapons; they’re inherently bad for self-defense because they favor the person who incites violence, not the victim. If two people living in a house together have guns, the person who is most likely to turn on the other has the advantage. As for date rape – well, if you’re drugged, a gun isn’t going to do much for you. It’s more likely to get taken away from you and used against you.

In an emotional address to grieving families, first responders and other mourners at a Newtown high school, Mr Obama said he would use “whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this”.

“Because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine,” he told the interfaith service.

“Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm?

“Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?

“I’ve been reflecting on this for the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no.

My privilege as a chemist might come across here, but I think this is silly. I made thermite and explosive powders when I was 10-11 range. I’ve made smokeless powder of a quality reasonable enough to reload ammunition and I’ve reloaded ammunition. Machining a brass casing is relatively easy. I’ve never made primer though, so I don’t know how difficult that is, but I doubt it is much more complicate than lead styphnate. While more complicated than smokeless powders, anybody smart enough to moonshine could probably figure it out. Basic point: ammunition is not that hard to make. Trying to control ammunition begs analogy to trying to control opiates.

So if you try and control ammunition, how much control? No person can have more than 30 rounds? That’s still enough to cause a massacre. No person can have more than 5 rounds? That’s crazy restrictive, especially in the more rural regions where hunting is important and the law is actually far away. Are you going to require people in rural Montana to pay to using shooting ranges to practice their aim rather than plinking on their own land? Do you make people return their casings? What if somebody went hunting and lost a casing, what do you charge them with?

Guns are easier to control because they are big and complicated. I have relatively good machining skills and it would probably be a major project for me to machine a revolver, much less a self-loading receiver. I’d need specialized tools and specialized stock metal. The tools necessary to machine a firearm are also relatively easy to regulate because they are big and expensive. So while ammunition control sounds like a nice idea, and it makes a damn good comedy routine, it doesn’t seem like functional policy to me.

…but I did that when I was like 14! The components can be bought at a combination of the hardware store, grocery store, and home and garden store! You don’t even need beakers and flasks. Hell, it was easier to make smokeless powder than it was to properly distill ethanol… which I never did outside the lab because that would be illegal.

hell man, I was doing research on fish when I was a teenager too, and then became a marine biologist.

strangely, I don’t expect to find most of the general populace keen on know what the difference between euryhaline and stenohaline is.

I’ve met a lot of people who repack cartridges, and even then they consider it going “above and beyond” for their “hobby”, but I can only recall ONE person who ever even attempted to make their own, and they never did it again.

I think you overestimate how many would bother, frankly, even if it WAS hard to get ammo.

Guns are quick weapons; they’re inherently bad for self-defense because they favor the person who incites violence, not the victim.

This, I believe, is very important.

If someone already has a gun pointed at you, your chances of drawing your own weapon and shooting back before you’re shot yourself are vanishingly small. Who is more likely to draw first? The criminals, the violent and the paranoid. If Colt made men equal, then the more murderous among us are more equal than the rest.

In a case where two people have guns, they are likely to escalate conflict, rather than defuse it. It’s simple: one person waves a gun to show they can defend themselves. The other person, imbued with the same mentality, does the same because they’re getting a gun waved at them. Then it goes down to who feels more justified to respond with lethal force to a threat of lethal force.

There are people who distill moonshine rather than pay liquor tax, and that’s pretty tough to do correctly. A lot of people do it poorly two, and then they go blind which is funny in a morbid kind of way (hint: discard the first fraction, it’s methanol). And that’s to avoid paying a few percent tax.

In order to make ammunition restrictions worthwhile in terms of preventing massacres they’d need to be fairly draconian. As in nobody can have more than 5-10 rounds of ammo. With this country’s spirit and that kind of restriction, homebrew ammo would become a thing. And if you let people have more rounds than that, like 20-100 rounds the restriction becomes pointless. A lot of death is contained in 20 rounds.

I’m still a bigger fan of restricting who can have firearms than restricting what kind of firearm they can have. And besides which SCOTUS has said that while the government has an interest and power to regulate firearms, it is beyond the power of the government to regulate handguns out of existence (See the D.C. handgun case). Hell, they decided on 10th amendment grounds that forcing the states to require background checks to purchase firearms is beyond the power of the federal government. Unless the 2nd amendment is amended away or this supreme court flat out reverses their record, firearm ownership is a explicitly protected right.

I still think the best thing we can do is require a training program, like for motor vehicles, in order to own firearms that includes a psychiatric analysis and background check. Along with that, require periodic updates to maintain the license just like with motor vehicles. As a compromise the government should be compelled to grant licenses to any and all persons who pass the requirements, just like with motor vehicles. That way the law as written is a clear regulation of the militia and could be argued to fall well within the powers granted to the federal government by the second amendment, thus avoiding the 10th amendment challenge.

I’m still so angry about what’s happened, and now the news that one six-year-old survived by pretending to be dead is too horrible for words. I also think the fact that Penn Jillette (rabid libertarian) is being given pride of place on Richard Dawkin’s website at the moment is disgraceful. For anyone who’s still not clear on the issue, Think Progress has posted some excellent articles about gun control in the last few days.

Well it sucks to be a fan of someone for years and be called an asshole. It must be really nice to be able to surround ones self with those that agree within the 95% range, instead of the mere 90%. Then again I’m not a liberal b/c I like to be patted on the head.

To respond to PZ: I know exactly where every one of my bullets are. A lot of people don’t b/c they don’t view guns with repulsion. They grew up with them. The idea of using them violently and with murderous intent doesn’t cross their minds. To them, shocking though it may be, misplacing bullets would be like misplacing tennis balls. Dumb, naive, and dangerous? Sure, but do you really want to bankrupt what would inevitably be hundreds of families b/c of a dumb mistake?

Meh, I don’t see much point posting when I agree with everyone. Who here likes universal healthcare and wished for a single payer system?

I argue b/c it’s one of the best ways I know to promote growth. I have ideas but if I don’t test them out beyond my own head, then it will get quite stagnant up there. Often I just find people around me to argue with but this is one of the rarer cases where most of the people around me agree with me. Maybe I should spend more time here agreeing with all the stuff I agree with in order to build up some cred.

It is a bit weak to spend so much time trying to psychoanalyze me. I never meant that a suicide (gun or otherwise) “tidies” up the messy problem of a depressed human being, but I was accused of it. I never blamed ANY group for the problems and (unfair) challenges they face, yet I was accused of racism and homophobia. Now I’m some pathetic egotist who needs to be admired as an iconoclast. I, brave thinker, am the only one who can fight against the tide of groupthink!

Also, don’t think I’m not critically examining what I’ve said. I honestly can’t justify high capacity magazines. I’m skeptical if making them illegal would actually work, but morally I can’t back them. They are the one firearms “upgrade” that makes mass killings so much easier and they have such little value beyond their purpose. If that last bit is confusing, many people (including myself) see art, history, and science in fire arms. Nobody views magazines beyond their practical purpose of holding bullets.

If that last bit is confusing, many people (including myself) see art, history, and science in fire arms.

Cotton, the few posts I’ve read of yours are reasonably written. I don’t think you deserve the scorn people are heaping on you. I actually agree with you about the art of firearm design. I see something elegant and beautiful int the simplicity with which many of the technical problems facing firearms were solved. The self loading design of the M1911, early as it was in the history of firearms, is really cool. I kind of want one. I’d also like a Ruger Mini 14 and an Springfield for their historic roles and target practice. But I live in NYC, so firearm ownership is impractical.

There are even strong historical arguments that firearms had a strong role in democratization in European cultures, and it definitely had a strong role in many revolutions. There is some merit in the concern that remove the power to control lethal force from the people will enable those same people to be more easily oppressed should the tide of power shift to the more fascist among us. But this is an argument that the current context will change for the worse in the future and that we will be better off if we are armed. While I have some sympathy for this argument, I’ve never seen it really well fleshed out and it wouldn’t be too hard to address in a rational gun control scheme.

That all being said, gun control in the modern context has a really strong argument: lots of people die using firearms and we don’t seem to get much by having them right now. I get frustrated by the lack of knowledge display in some gun control legislation. For example, the assault weapon ban did a lot to ban scary looking black guns, but repackage the same receiver and magazine in a wood finish and bam it’s legal! Things like the Brady act are better in concept, if not execution (by this I mean that the fed can’t force states to do background checks ::facepalm::).

I want 1) background checks, 2) psychiatric evaluation, 3) firearm training required for firearm ownership. Permits should then be given without arbitrary withholding (like they do in New York). A national gun registry would also be nice, but baby steps. Also, we should increase civil and criminal penalties for negligent discharges and mandate immediate reporting of all lost and stolen firearms (but don’t penalize losing a firearm unless clear black-market trading is happening, reporting is more important). If you need to be trained to to own a firearm there should be consequences for screwing it up.

I want 1) background checks, 2) psychiatric evaluation, 3) firearm training required for firearm ownership. Permits should then be given without arbitrary withholding (like they do in New York). A national gun registry would also be nice, but baby steps. Also, we should increase civil and criminal penalties for negligent discharges and mandate immediate reporting of all lost and stolen firearms (but don’t penalize losing a firearm unless clear black-market trading is happening, reporting is more important). If you need to be trained to to own a firearm there should be consequences for screwing it up.

Asshole, read the whole thread. This has been discussed already and IT ISN’T ENOUGH. It wouldn’t do a fucking thing to help.

This specifically was brought up when the fact the shooter got the guns from his mother came up.

Asshole, read the whole thread. This has been discussed already and IT ISN’T ENOUGH.

Oh, hello there. Nice to meet you too! Did it ever occur to you that I did read the thread? You may have noticed, that when I have had time to post, that the other proposals are so well and beyond constitutional that there is no way they are anything more than grandstanding. Gun bans are just that, granstanding.

I’d rather have real reforms that take real steps, even if they are small. There is a culture shift that needs to happen. That starts with licensing and a gun registry.

I actually agree with you about the art of firearm design. I see something elegant and beautiful int the simplicity with which many of the technical problems facing firearms were solved. The self loading design of the M1911, early as it was in the history of firearms, is really cool. I kind of want one. I’d also like a Ruger Mini 14 and an Springfield for their historic roles and target practice.

You come to a thread about a school shooting massacre and mentally masturbate about guns.

You come to a thread about a school shooting massacre and mentally masturbate about guns.

And I went on to make a case for gun control. It’s nice to cherry pick. A person can both find beauty in an object and be horrified by its use.

Once you acknowledge your position has no basis in reality versus slogans/presuppositions, then you might show lack of asshole posting.

The only position you can possibly mean is that banning guns in unconstitutional, otherwise you’d be talking about either a personal opinion (guns have aesthetic qualities) or an idea that mostly matches the culture here (gun control is good and this tragedy should be used to advance gun control). If I missed something, please be specific.

The supreme court has found that the 2nd amendment contains within it a right to firearm ownership (District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008)). This also made it beyond the power of government to force firearms to be kept disassembled and locked. This is the current supreme court, not the supreme court a few hundred years ago. Attempting to do similar bans in the United States is an exercise in futility.

Furthermore, the section of the Brady act that requires states to run background checks was also struck down by the supreme court of the US (Mack and Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997)). This means any regulation that is passed on firearms cannot compel the states in the same manner as the Brady act and expect to survive.

I’m horrified by this insane massacre and I want to see some sort of gun control legislation happen, but I don’t want it to be some showboat legislation that just gets struck down. With nearly half of the US population owning firearms, I don’t expect a second amendment alteration to pass either senate or house. Or even if it is, I doubt the states would ratify it.

And I also remember the sheer number of people who are killed by firearms here each year. Even if we say that the 60% or so that use firearms to commit suicide would have managed anyway, that still leaves roughly 15,000 people killed (source earlier in this thread, find it yourself). Many of those deaths are opportunistic crimes of passion and, although I have no data, I’d be willing to bet that many firearm owners are casual owners. If a small barrier were put before them, like a firearm safety course and a licensing exam, would not bother owning a firearm. If that is true, even a small barrier would reduce the rate of gun ownership.

Maybe the sick fuck who killed all those kids would not have had easy access to a gun because his mother wouldn’t have bothered to get one. Maybe he’d have done like Breivik and killed a bunch of people anyway.

But what do I know? I find guns aesthetically pleasing so I must be a horrible person.

Well it sucks to be a fan of someone for years and be called an asshole. It must be really nice to be able to surround ones self with those that agree within the 95% range, instead of the mere 90%. Then again I’m not a liberal b/c I like to be patted on the head.

What an iconoclast you are, defending guns in America. Go you, I guess.

A lot of people don’t b/c they don’t view guns with repulsion. They grew up with them. The idea of using them violently and with murderous intent doesn’t cross their minds.

I actually agree with you about the art of firearm design. I see something elegant and beautiful int the simplicity with which many of the technical problems facing firearms were solved. The self loading design of the M1911, early as it was in the history of firearms, is really cool.

Hey, you fucking heartless piece of shit asshole, point your sexual organs away from us when masturbating over guns. This is a thread about people who were shot. Don’t you have a shred of shame?

Cherry picking? I will quote your entire paragraph I was referring to.

Cotton, the few posts I’ve read of yours are reasonably written. I don’t think you deserve the scorn people are heaping on you. I actually agree with you about the art of firearm design. I see something elegant and beautiful int the simplicity with which many of the technical problems facing firearms were solved. The self loading design of the M1911, early as it was in the history of firearms, is really cool. I kind of want one. I’d also like a Ruger Mini 14 and an Springfield for their historic roles and target practice. But I live in NYC, so firearm ownership is impractical.

This is not you qualifying that you are interested in guns. This is you gushing over them. If you cannot see how this can be considered inappropriate in a post specifically about children getting murdered with guns then you are an asshole.

And I went on to make a case for gun control.

2 paragraphs telling us how wonderful guns are and 2 paragraphs about gun control. Tell me how misunderstood you are.

Maybe the sick fuck who killed all those kids would not have had easy access to a gun because his mother wouldn’t have bothered to get one. Maybe he’d have done like Breivik and killed a bunch of people anyway.

The post suggests that some idiot will propose arming all 7 year olds.

You win – You suggest that if there was more gun control this guy could have killed more people. Again – you are an asshole.

But what do I know? I find guns aesthetically pleasing so I must be a horrible person.

Please refer to where someone has called you a horrible person for finding guns aesthetically pleasing.

Hey Dobbs, I long ago decided not to answer some of the wild crap here. I’m sure Koshka’s low bar for assholism means its pretty tough for him to get out of the bed in the morning and face a daily commute. In a thread specifically about gun control we are raving assholes for talking about gun control.

I agree with a lot of what you said. I don’t mind a very high bar to owning a gun in the first place, and a very high level of responsibility in keeping one. There is no point to having the first part if after a person is trusted with firearm ownership they allow access to those that have not cleared that bar.

A ban on the manufacture (or even ownership) of 30 round mags might help in the future. There are so many of them out there, though, I don’t see that taking effect for a while.

A key problem bugging me is that gun owners and liberals are, generally speaking, VERY different groups that have little in common. So, its pretty easy to dismiss their points of view. It’s not like they will be burning bridges they care about. There are a LOT of good people out there who just enjoy owning guns and shooting them who do not have some fundamental flaw.

The debate over gun control laws will be irrelevant in the near future when kids can download CAD files and make a gun at home on a 3D printer while their parents are at work.

From a public health standpoint, if at that point regulations have already reduced the appeal of guns and their prevalence in, say American culture, then that eventuality is moot.

Consider smoking bans in public places. They have myriad intents, but they correlate with reductions of smoking uptake in younger generations. Of course, they operated in conjunction with advertising bans and increased prices (at least here in Canada). Behaviors are interrelated. Access and interest both influence.
There aren’t ‘magic bullet’ interventions: there are a variety of interventions that target various components of the population. To insist on complete efficacy from any one intervention displays a poor understanding of the forces that influence populations and absolutist thinking at its worst.

There are a LOT of good people out there who just enjoy owning guns and shooting them who do not have some fundamental flaw.

There are a lot of good people out there who also happen to be Christian, or Catholic, and some of them are so enamored of their religion that they’re blinded to the abuses it propagates. However, nobody picks up their religiosity and blows holes in another person with it.

You win – You suggest that if there was more gun control this guy could have killed more people.

Your critical reading skills could use some work, asshat. I was suggesting that crazy fucktards will do crazy fucktard shit, gun control be damned. That’s not an argument against gun control.

There are a LOT of good people out there who just enjoy owning guns and shooting them who do not have some fundamental flaw.

That has to be true, given the stats in this thread alone. There are a lot of guns in the US, most of them aren’t used badly. This tragedy is a perfect opportunity to get those gun owners to embrace gun control. What reasonable person thinks their right to own guns is worth thousands of people getting shot? (Well a few, apparently But this this shit? I mean, those and god damn children!)

The regulations on gun ownership are coming. I just want them to 1) work and 2) survive the inevitable court challenges. The reflexive hatred of anybody to expresses a minutia interest in guns is silly. The call to ban firearms is worse: it won’t survive the courts and will waste the mandate to fix the problem. It’s stupid.

I’m sure Koshka’s low bar for assholism means its pretty tough for him to get out of the bed in the morning and face a daily commute.

Yes people everywhere are acting like assholes. I try to call them out when I can. Pharyngula has encouraged me to do this. I act like an asshole sometimes and people should feel free to call me out. It has happened here and it gave me the shits at first but then I stopped and though about it. Then I apologised.

Tell me, do you think it is appropriate to gush all over guns like dobbshead did on a post about people being murdered by guns? Here it is again. Please excuse my ‘cherry picking’.

I actually agree with you about the art of firearm design. I see something elegant and beautiful int the simplicity with which many of the technical problems facing firearms were solved. The self loading design of the M1911, early as it was in the history of firearms, is really cool. I kind of want one. I’d also like a Ruger Mini 14 and an Springfield for their historic roles and target practice.

You will notice that this wank was instigated by your

If that last bit is confusing, many people (including myself) see art, history, and science in fire arms.

I did not take exception to your comment. Dobbshead however is way over the top on a post about PEOPLE BEING MURDERED WITH GUNS.

I can understand people finding guns interesting but how hard is to understand that this post is about PEOPLE BEING MURDERED WITH GUNS.

Your critical reading skills could use some work, asshat. I was suggesting that crazy fucktards will do crazy fucktard shit, gun control be damned. That’s not an argument against gun control.

What you said was

Maybe the sick fuck who killed all those kids would not have had easy access to a gun because his mother wouldn’t have bothered to get one. Maybe he’d have done like Breivik and killed a bunch of people anyway.

Why mention Breivik? If you wanted to suggest that “crazy fucktards will do crazy fucktard shit, gun control be damned” then maybe you should have said that. Your critical writing skills could use some work.

Also I not the mental health slur and call you an asshole once again. There is another thread dealing with assholes targeting people with mental health problems with regards to this tragedy. This is probably where you should post this garbage.

I mentioned Breivik because he went out of his way to obtain firearms through legal channels in countries that are otherwise relatively restrictive of firearms, and then used them to kill a lot of people. The point is that the best policies can’t stop every catastrophic event, but they can alter frequency.

“Crazy fucktards” Mental health slur doesn’t cover that subtlety which is necessary when trying to discus appropriate policy. If you weren’t in such a rush to show me what an asshole I am you might have realized that.

Cotton:
You and dobbs are assholes because you are both talking about your appreciation and/or love of guns in the face of this tragedy.
Imagine if one of the parents of the slain children were in this thread. Think of how they-not YOU-would feel hearing talk about how lovely guns are. That’s massively insensitive at best. I prefer asshole.
As for the comments you are avoiding/ignoring–
Your reactions have been based-understandably-on your personal bias. That doesn’t change the fact that attempting to deflect focus from firearm violence to gunfights in the inner cities with their primarily black and brown people is a racist perspective. Think outside your privilege. Gun violence is very real. It is very out of control. And it is not restricted to any particular race.

Dobbshead:
Please don’t use ableist terms like fucktards. They are slurs against the mentally disabled and are not welcome here. Note the use of insults such as:
Asshat
Fuckwit
Douchebag
None of those is a slur against any group and are acceptable here.

Think of how they-not YOU-would feel hearing talk about how lovely guns are.

I’d hope they’d read a little better than many of the people in this thread. I was putting forward a reason why somebody who likes guns should support gun control. There is nothing disrespectful about that in the least.

That doesn’t change the fact that attempting to deflect focus from firearm violence to gunfights in the inner cities with their primarily black and brown people is a racist perspective.

You see, that’s why I actually started talking to Cotton because he did the opposite of that and then got himself stuck in a rhetorical hole. Well, he said it really poorly, but he was trying! And he got jumped on for it.

So what, do you want people to try and rhetorically work out their thinking, maybe come around to your perspective? Do you want people who like guns to feel comfortable vocally supporting gun control? Or do you want to yell at people?

I understand the yelling, it’s hard to make sense of shooting 20 children.

With new gun control laws, there’d be new laws for the Supreme Court to interpret — which is what they do, because laws can change and they do not write those laws. Old decisions about what is or isn’t “Constitutional” could thus be overturned. So there’s no reason to assume everything deemed “Constitutional” now will just have to stay that way. Right now, it would be very hard to ban guns for political reasons (because we have dumbasses like you and cotton); but that is not a legal or Constitutional issue, just a cultural one.

Semi-off-topic, why is fuckwit ok?

It’s never been a medical diagnosis. “Retardation” was, and people still associate the term with anyone who has cognitive or learning disabilities.

Being irrational or spewing ignorant, bigoted nonsense is not at all the same thing and should be discouraged (in the same way it would make no sense to discourage someone from having a disability).

No matter how much has passed, no matter what (s)he’s said since, no matter how much (s)he tries to dress up their opinion, cotton still supported his right to own a gun with, and I paraphrase for brevity:

“I like shooting and want to keep doing it, so what if 100 people a year die in mass shootings so I have the right to this hobby.”

It’s all there in their first post, just said in a more rambling wordy way intended to sound reasonable and clever. Cut through everything else and that is still the central premise of their argument.

That’s what makes them an arsehole, everything that came after was just polishing a turd with more shit.

Koshka: First I was the worst person here, and now you appeal to my reason so that I may see dobbs is truly an asshole.

Tony: I would not say things like that to someone who had been in this tragedy. So…what? Just b/c I would be polite and not do something purposefully insensitive doesn’t mean my opinions are wrong. When I visited my aging grandfather in the nursing home I never went around tearing down old people’s religion b/c it would be a dick move. That doesn’t mean my atheistic standpoint was/is wrong. I’m also not writing this under some general reading area like facebook or a personal blog. This has all been written on a thread about gun control, on a blog known to be unwelcome to the faint of heart.

Old decisions about what is or isn’t “Constitutional” could thus be overturned. So there’s no reason to assume everything deemed “Constitutional” now will just have to stay that way.

To some degree what you are saying is true. The supreme court reversed its position on separate, but equal being constitutional (Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)). It took over 50 years for the supreme court to overturn that decision. I think it is important to note that these were different courts, as in there were totally different judges on the bench.

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) pretty much just happened. If laws are written that raise the same constitutional issues as that case, they’ll get struck down and not move through appellate court because the jurisprudence is against them. I also doubt that this court would be willing to revisit their arguments. It would be like passing a law that requires school prayer: it’d just get struck down and ignored by the courts.

I’m not saying that it is a good thing, I’m just saying that is how it works.

Cotton:
This blog may be many things, but it is not a place that is insensitive to tragedy. As I’ve said, you are so focused on guns=good that your insensitivity permeates almost everything you write. I have seen precious little empathy from you. You seem to hold firearms to be more important than human life. For a second I thought I had the wrong opinion of you, but until such time as you realize that guns are an unimportant “right”, and should never even be compared the value of human life, I don’t think my opinion of you is wrong.

The heck with your gaslighting. HAVING a heart isn’t being ‘faint of heart’, though I’m not surprised you conflate them after going on about how much gun owners appreciate and care about their guns. People appreciated and cared about the children that died in Newtown, too, along with the 32,000 other actual living people that died by gun this past year. It’s entirely reasonable to value lives above inanimate objects. But you only mentioned *victims* to try and demonstrate how concerned and empathetic (and non-racist) you want us to think you are. Looks like your sympathies lie with the poor unloved little killing tools.

There are a lot of guns in the US, most of them aren’t used badly. – dobbshead

How do you think you know that? We have no way of knowing how many are used to shoot animals simply for fun, to shoot them in ways that risk injury resulting in prolonged suffering, as explicit or implicit threats against people, andor to bolster toxic masculinities. That’s not even counting the ones exported to kill people abroad (where do you think the Mexican drug gangs get their guns?), the ones stored in unsafe ways, or the general effect of gun-worship on American culture.

We have no way of knowing how many are used to shoot animals simply for fun, to shoot them in ways that risk injury resulting in prolonged suffering, as explicit or implicit threats against people, andor to bolster toxic masculinities.

Hemenway and a colleague conducted their own survey and then asked five criminal court judges to review their data to determine the legality of the incidents of defensive gun use reported by respondents. “A majority of the reported self-defense gun uses were rated as probably illegal by a majority of judges,” they found.

The conclusion: “Guns are used to threaten and intimidate far more often than they are used in self-defense.”

There are a LOT of good people out there who just enjoy owning guns and shooting them

Ok, so let’s take it as a given for the moment that one can enjoy shooting guns without being completely antisocial. Why do you have to own the gun? And if you must own the gun, for whatever reason, why do you have to keep it on your person or in your dwelling? If the gun is for sport, why not keep it at a registered gun club* where you will have access to it any time you want to go shoot a target or go hunting or whatever it is you want to do? Why keep the guns at home where a person intent on mass murder can get them, shoot you, and take off for a school shooting with them?

*Current regulations on gun clubs and how they store guns are almost certainly ridiculously weak, but that could be fixed relatively easily. Maybe require the guns to be stored in a double locked cabinet where only an employee has the combination to one lock and only the owner of the particular gun has the other or something.

If one wants to engage in target shooting, why not use an air rifle ? Both air rifle and air pistol are Olympic disciplines. and there is far less hassle with transporting your weapons for competitions.

While gun enthusiasts frequently deny being paranoid, or drawn to guns to “prove” their manhood, Mark Murrman at Mother Jones discovered gun manufacturers disagree with their customers about their motives. He collected a series of gun ads, and showed that they often riffed on anxieties about masculinity or right-wing paranoias. Bushmaster, which makes one of the guns that Adam Lanza used to snuff out the lives of 27 people, ran ads in Maxim with copy reading, “Consider your man card reissued.” Remington ran an ad claiming that private gun owners constituted an “army” that politicians should fear. These kinds of ads increase gun sales, but at the cost of perpetuating the toxic culture in which guns proliferate as a panacea for anxious masculinity and overblown fears that one has to protect oneself from government breaking down your door or criminals invading your home.

There’s two reasons to support legislations banning gun advertising. One, it’s a strategy that has been tried before with a different deadly product—cigarettes—which makes it an easy sell and relatively protected against court tests. Two, it would put the National Rifle Association (NRA) on the defense, exposing their true nature as an industry lobby and not as a rights organization.

Dick’s Sporting goods has suspended all gun and ammunition sales near Newtown, CT and suspended the sale of ‘modern sporting rifles’ nationwide. It is unclear if the national part will be permanent or not. They specify, the press release, that it is ‘during this time of national mourning.’

A statement on Dick’s corporate website expresses sympathy for the victims’ families. It says sales of “modern sporting rifles” will be suspended during “this time of national mourning.”

Additionally,

Earlier Tuesday, Wall Street private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management said it will sell its stake in firearms maker Freedom Group, which makes one of the guns used in Friday’s mass shooting that killed 26 people, including 20 children.

“We are extremely saddened by the unspeakable tragedy that occurred last week in Newtown, Conn., and our hearts go out to the victims and their families, and to the entire community.
“Out of respect for the victims and their families, during this time of national mourning we have removed all guns from sale and from display in our store nearest to Newtown and suspended the sale of modern sporting rifles in all of our stores chainwide.
“We continue to extend our deepest sympathies to those affected by this terrible tragedy.”
The company did not say how long it planned to leave the measures in place.

There are a lot of guns in the US, most of them aren’t used badly. – dobbshead

Using the numbers in this thread for ballpark math: there are about 300 million guns in the U.S., about half of all households have guns. So lets say about 150 million people in the US have access to guns. There are about 30,000 deaths due to firearms, some 50,000 accidental injuries. Lets round it to an even 100,000 cases of people screwing up with guns. In a given year, less than 0.1% of all people with access to firearms in the United States screw up using them by these metrics. Even if we assume that there are an order of magnitude more close calls, that still leaves 99% of owners in the clear.

This is NOT an argument against gun control, nor against the problem the gun culture poses. It is a statement of the magnitude of the problem as has been given in this thread.

What about the guy threatening his neighbor with a gun? Or guns used to terrorize a rape victim? Or guns used in crimes in which none were injured? Or someone shooting a neighbor’s dog because it won’t shut up? Or all the other crimes and misdemeanors in which firearms are used in which no one is killed or injured by the firearm?

Typical gun-nut dishonesty. According to this source, there are over 200,000 non-fatal gun injuries per year in the USA – not a difficult figure to find. Moreover, you can “screw up” with a gun without killing or injuring someone – you can use it to rob someone, or to intimidate an innocent person, you can behave in a way that risks killing or injuring someone, you can cause unnecessary death or suffering to non-human animals, you can behave in a way that could allow someone else to get hold of your gun and misuse it.

Moreover, you can “screw up” with a gun without killing or injuring someone

Or you can leave your guns lying around the house (as a commentator here proudly admitted he does) and have it stolen. In which case it is hard to see how you then do not bare some responsibility for what then is done with the gun.

Since most gun owners keep their guns for many decades or even grow up with them for a lifetime, I doubt that the *annual* statistics are all that useful when claiming a percentage of gun *owners* are the good and responsible kind. Say 100,000 screw-ups per year, over say ten years? That’s a million. Thirty years? 3 million, and now we’re up to 1% of all gun owners, using vastly oversimplified statistics.

Matt:
Apparently many people think owning a gun is an inalienable right following “…the pursuit of happiness.”. When you have the right to own your own personal killing machine, why settle for anything less? Blecch!

What about the guy threatening his neighbor with a gun? Or guns used to terrorize a rape victim? Or guns used in crimes in which none were injured? Or someone shooting a neighbor’s dog because it won’t shut up? Or all the other crimes and misdemeanors in which firearms are used in which no one is killed or injured by the firearm?

Not counted, not because they don’t count but because they weren’t mentioned in the sources in this thread. They are also really hard to count. If you have a good source, I’d be interested.

Typical gun-nut dishonesty.

Except not: if anything those numbers are a call to action as Pteryxx (#819) points out correctly. Gun deaths roughly equal motor vehicle death, and a gun has no purpose other than killing. I was not attempting to be dishonest, I was even rounding in all cases to make guns a larger problem than the numbers say. I even pointed out what the number would be if we assume an order of magnitude under-reporting. In terms of injuries, I was using this source:

“But the number who are reported with non-fatal injuries from firearms through hospital emergency departments in 2009 was about 58,000 people.”NPR: Guns 101

It’s not peer reviewed, but I have no reason to distrust the numbers given in the interview. I said 50k + 30k –> 100k ‘screw ups’, again rounding in favor of under-reporting.

I’d also like to point out, according to the sources quoted so far, that there has been a 70% reduction in annual reported injuries due to firearms from 1994 to 2009. That’s more than a little significant.

I like this source you posted, Pteryxx. Do you know of an more general studies though? It would be ‘nice’ to have numbers for how many people are threatened by firearms each year that doesn’t vary by an order of magnitude.

However, our results should not be extrapolated to obtain population based estimates of the absolute number of gun uses. If we have as little as 1% random misclassification, our results could be off by orders of magnitude.

“But the number who are reported with non-fatal injuries from firearms through hospital emergency departments in 2009 was about 58,000 people.”
NPR: Guns 101

It’s not peer reviewed, but I have no reason to distrust the numbers given in the interview. I said 50k + 30k –> 100k ‘screw ups’, again rounding in favor of under-reporting.

More gun-nut dishonesty. First, injuries that do not result in emergency hospital admissions are still injuries. Second, there are all the other categories of “screw-ups” I identified, which you again ignore completely.

Where ‘like’ means ‘cherry-pick a limitation while ignoring the rest of the discussion’.

In our survey, the criminal court judges who rated the incidents determined that at least half were probably illegal—even after assuming that the respondent had a permit to own and carry a gun and described the incident honestly. We expect that the true percentage of reported self defense gun uses that are illegal is higher than 50% for at least two reasons.

First, three respondents reported over 58% of the self defense gun uses, and none of their accounts were read by the judges (since all refused to provide a description of the most recent event). Many reported self defense gun uses from a respondent creates a suspicion that the uses may be aggressive rather than defensive.

Second, the reports read by the judges are only one side of a hostile interaction that usually occurred months or years before the survey. We expect respondents will view the hostile encounter from their own perspective; in any mutual combat both participants may believe that the other side is the aggressor and that they themselves are acting in self defense. In addition, when describing the event, respondents will typically want to present themselves in the best possible light.15–20

Using data from a survey of detainees in a Washington D.C. jail, we worked with a prison physician to investigate the circumstances of gunshot wounds to these criminals.
We found that one in four of these detainees had been wounded, in events that appear unrelated to their incarceration. Most were shot when they were victims of robberies, assaults and crossfires. Virtually none report being wounded by a “law-abiding citizen.”

Where ‘like’ means ‘cherry-pick a limitation while ignoring the rest of the discussion’.

No, where like means I like the study and think the discussion is interesting. I think the number of of people threatened by guns, but not injured, is an important number to know and I’d like to have a study done on a sample size large enough to be representative. This study warrants further research, and I was just wondering if you happened to know of any follow-up studies.

Let’s review: Any honest observer should be able to admit that if the gunmen in these mass shootings mostly had, say, Muslim names or were mostly, say, African-American men, the country right now wouldn’t be confused about the causes of the violence, and wouldn’t be asking broad questions. There would probably be few queries or calls for reflection, and mostly definitive declarations blaming the bloodshed squarely on Islamic fundamentalism or black nationalism, respectively. Additionally, we would almost certainly hear demands that the government intensify the extant profiling systems already aimed at those groups.

Yet, because the the perpetrators in question in these shootings are white men and not ethnic or religious minorities, nobody is talking about demographic profiling them as a group. The discussion, instead, revolves around everything from gun control, to mental health services, to violence in entertainment —everything, that is, except trying to understanding why the composite of these killers is so similar across so many different massacres. This, even though there are plenty of reasons for that topic to be at least a part of the conversation.

Maybe you’re right, I should show that. If I really believe in my skeptical gun control position I shouldn’t be afraid that empathy would reflect poorly upon on.

I needed to say something about this as it was happening, as I read about it on the internet. So I texted my Mom. I said what was obvious: it was unthinkable. Of course it was unthinkable, no shit, right? But I had to say something b/c it was just too awful to READ about and sit there doing my job.

I can’t imagine how devastated those people are. For the rest of their lives will they be able to even look at each other w/o immediately going back to that day? Immediately to that first phone call that told them something was wrong. Then they get it. The tone of voice or the facial twitch of the police officer. His eyes just a little too unblinking and wide.

I think about the first responders who had to go into a school room filled with dead children. An absolute nightmare beyond any horror movie scene. I would have to leave, and I guess many will. They will leave and tell noone or almost noone in order to reduce the burden of every day having to be “one of those poor parents” looked upon by their neighbors with pity and guilty thanks that it “wasn’t my kid”.

So yeah, I agree with everyone here, it was unthinkably awful. It is beyond the most awful things I can imagine.

Option 1: Debate gun control. Response: You showed no empathy for the victims!

Option 2: Show empathy for victims. Response: And yet you still put your little guns ahead that suffering!

That is literally not caring to talk about it. It’s one thing to have an opinion or agenda, another to simply dismiss the very value of talking about something. If you are “past” this debate or “so over it” well…bye.

Also, I don’t think guns are the root of the problem. I think that a young boy / man desiring to shoot up a school is a problem. That’s the problem to solve. This should not be solved, at least knee jerk, by liberals trading in other people’s rights in order to ensure the crazy can’t exercise them either.

I think a perfect analogy would be fast cars. Assault rifles are the least practical and most lethal of guns. Fast cars are the least practical and most lethal of autos. Shouldn’t we then, by the same logic many want to ban assault rifles, ban fast cars? They serve no purpose except fun. A 400+ horsepower Mustang GT that goes twice the legal speed limit anywhere in this country is CLEARLY superfluous. If I told you I really like fast cars, how many of you would view me as a reckless, penis compensating, selfish, asshole? Probably not as many as do for the very similar desire to shoot guns.

Gee, without the guns, wounds but no deaths in China. With the guns in the US, many children dead. Where is your brain? It isn’t working beyond spouting slogans. We know that. Why can’t you acknowledge that?

Would you like to start debating gun control? If so, unplug your ears, stop whining and don’t change the subject. Gun control actually has to be on the table in order to debate it, not just whatever fucking bullshit you want to ramble about.

Sort it by the number killed or injured, and firearms also get sorted to the top of the list.

sort it by weapon, and check out the “additional notes” field.

What an odd coincidence that most of those using firearms also committed suicide, instead of being arrested or shot. It’s almost as if they could efficiently kill however many they wanted, before any law enforcement could arrive to stop them.

Explain how that is acceptable, cotton. Because FREEDOM or BIG MACS or whatever you have left.

Is it? Here’s an analogy without any possible Nazi connotations so you don’t have the Godwin gag reflex.

I come into a thread about the victims of the Chinese knife guy and start waxing poetic about makes and models of knives, the sharpness of their edges, how their serrated sides are elegantly machine-tooled to cut through bones with ease, how comfortable are their grips for quick swiping action etc.

At the very least, I’ll be a giant asshole. Which is, coincidentally, exactly what I think you are.

Cotton:
It’s nice to see some empathy. Given how you’ve been so pro gun throughout the thread-vigorously-it doesn’t come across as genuine as you may have intended. If you’d only posted two “guns are fun” comments and then displayed some sorrow or grief, it might be different. Likewise, if you had not made massively stupid comparisons between firearms and vending machines/sports cars/beds things might be dfferent. But not only did you make the latter comparisons, you expressed your joy of guns repeatedly and it wasn’t til recently that you showed any empathy. Can you see how empty it is…especially when you are STILL making stupid comparisons?
If you’re going to compare guns with anything please use something that WAS CREATED TO KILL PEOPLE WITH. Cars were not created to murder. Guns were.

Slate article about gun safety technologies, such as smart triggers that only respond to the owner, and visible indicators that show whether a gun is loaded or not; also, the reason none of these have been implemented for consumers:

Why aren’t gunmakers making safer guns? Because guns are exempt from most of the consumer safety laws that improved the rest of American life. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which was established in 1972, is charged with looking over thousands of different kinds of products. If you search its database for “guns,” you’ll find lots of recalls of defective air pistols and lead-covered toy guns but nothing about real firearms. That’s because the CPSC is explicitly prohibited from regulating firearms. If you’re injured by a gun, you can’t even go to court. In 2005, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which immunizes gun makers against lawsuits resulting from “misuse” of the products. If they can’t be sued and can’t be regulated, gunmakers have no incentive to make smarter guns. It’s the Pinto story in reverse.

I disagree, I think that’s a poor analogy because even a fast car has the primary legitimate use of getting from one point to another. A better analogy would be owning a predator species. For example, a lot of people like to own dogs. Dogs are predators, especially the larger working breeds, and can be really vicious: certain breeds are clearly meant to kill and intimidate. In the modern context there isn’t much use for these dogs beyond people enjoy having them.

The most important thing about this analogy is how dogs differ from firearms: they don’t kill 30,000 people in this country a year. If they did then people’s right to own what property they please would be limited. Some jurisdictions already try and limit ownership of certain breeds of dogs because of the perceived danger, why are guns different (other than that they are in the constitution, that’s a different argument)?

On the flip side, if guns were only used in a few cases per year to hurt or kill people then recreational ownership would be sufficient to maintain the right to gun ownership. But that’s not the world we live in, we live in a world where roughly 100 people are shot every day on average and mass shootings are not rare. Increased gun responsibility is completely reasonable and you should vocally advocate for it.

If you’d only posted two “guns are fun” comments and then displayed some sorrow or grief, it might be different.

dobbshead:
I think you are being obtuse. At comment 794, I stated that you and cotton were assholes for talking about your love of guns in the face of this tragedy.
The comments I made about lacking empath were 804 & 831. Both were explicitly directed at cotton. Not you.

They can say sporting and hunting and target shooting and self-defense all day and late into the night, but they are fucking lying. What they mean is that they plan on killing a whole lot of people at the very moment that they believe they can get away with it, or when they decide it is necessary, or when they think they don’t have anything left to lose.

Which is precisely what every murderer does (bar the actually, provably legally insane ones).
(emphasis mine)